Shoulder the Sky

Another half hour passed slowly, then the door opened again and finally Cullingford came out. He was alone. She recognized him instantly, even though she saw only his silhouette against the light. The way he stood, the angle of his shoulders was unlike anyone else.

She thought of speaking to him: She could now, alone. But it would be absurdly undignified, as if she were running after him. The thought made her cringe.

He walked away, unaware that anyone saw him, and the moment was past. When he was around the corner, presumably to his lodging for the night, she went into the Seven Piglets again. It was far less crowded now and immediately she saw Wil sitting next to the new driver, both of them with glasses in their hands.

She hesitated, not knowing whether to interrupt them or not. Then Wil looked up and saw her. His face lit with pleasure and he waved enthusiastically. The driver turned to see who had drawn his attention.

Judith walked over.

“Of course she’ll help you,” Wil said encouragingly. “Judith, this is Corporal Stallabrass. He’s an excellent driver. He knows everything there is to know about engines, but he doesn’t know a damn thing about Flanders, at least not so far. Sit down.” He pulled a chair out for her.

“I really don’t expect . . .” Stallabrass began.

“We all help each other out here, Corporal,” Judith told him, seeing from the corner of her eye, out of Stallabrass’s sight, that Wil was topping up his glass with Pernod and very little water. It was lethal stuff. She had no idea what Wil was leading to, but she did her best to follow. “Share and share alike,” she added.

“I could tell you stories. . . .” Wil embarked on a long and rambling account of a journey to Armentières. It was entirely fictitious, and incorporated just about everything that could go wrong with a vehicle, and several that couldn’t.

“But . . .” Stallabrass started to argue several times, trying to assert his deeply studied knowledge. His face was earnest, and it apparently did not occur to him that Wil was deliberately embroidering the tale.

Judith got up quietly and went to the bar counter. She bought the rest of the bottle of Pernod and, with a jug of water, went back to the table. She would make her own mostly water, and surreptitiously refill Stallabrass’s glass every time he was not looking.

Wil’s account was growing wilder, and funnier every moment, and they were joined by a couple of other soldiers who were definitely a trifle happy for having imbibed generously most of the evening.

“I don’t believe that!” Stallabrass said haltingly when Wil finished a particularly lurid tale of greasing an ambulance hubcap with ripe Brie cheese and ending up stuck in a field surrounded by a herd of cows.

One of the other soldiers, named Dick, tried to keep a straight face, but the tears were running down his cheeks.

“I like cows,” his friend said sentimentally. “Beautiful eyes, cows have. Don’t you think so, Corporal Stallabrass? Ever noticed the eyelashes they ’ave?”

But Stallabrass was staring into the distance, his mind locked in some dream of his own. “Beautiful,” he repeated.

Wil glanced at Judith, then back at Stallabrass. “Is she?” he said with interest.

“Not everybody sees it,” Stallabrass shook his head very slowly, as if he were nervous it might wobble and slide off. “They only see her as an ordinary woman, stamps and letters and money, and things.” He sniffed and gave a genteel hiccup.

“Stamps and letters,” Wil said, obviously no idea what he was talking about. “But she’s not?”

“No,” Stallabrass said with deep emotion. “She has ideas, dreams . . . she has passion!” He sighed. “She has the most beautiful . . .” He stopped, his hands clasping his Pernod glass, expression wistful.

Everyone waited with breath held for what he was going to say.

Judith was faintly embarrassed, in case it turned out to be too intimate.

Wil grinned. “Eyes?” he suggested to Stallabrass. “What about the letters? Does she write to you often?”

Stallabrass looked startled. “Oh no! Letters are part of her profession!”

“What?” Wil was totally lost.

“Letters,” Stallabrass said patiently. “Stamps. She’s the postmistress. That’s what she does. It’s very important. Where would we be without the Royal Mail? It holds the world together. King’s head on every stamp. Do you know how serious it is to steal or damage the Royal Mail?”

“Oh yes,” Wil agreed hastily. “Very important job for a young woman. She must be very special. What’s her name?”

“Jeanette. She’s forty-one. . . .”

Wil gulped and started to cough. The other soldier, partly to hide his own expression, patted him vigorously on the back.

“But she’s beautiful?” Dick prompted gravely.

“Gorgeous.” Stallabrass nodded, taking Dick’s Pernod absently and drinking it. “Gilbert Darrow thinks he’s going to marry her, just because he’s got a uniform and he’s in the navy. Well, I’ve got a uniform, too!” He tried to square his shoulders, then changed his mind. “And I’m out here in France!”

“Flanders, actually,” Wil corrected him. “But what’s the difference, eh?”

“I’m here!” Stallabrass said carefully. “I shall see action! Front line—with the general. I shall win medals, and then we’ll see what Gilbert”—he hiccupped—“Darrow has to show for himself.” He blinked. “Say for himself,” he corrected. “Nothing, that’s what!”

“You’re right!” Dick agreed with a broad smile. “You win a chestful of medals and go home and win Jeanette’s hand. Sweep her off her feet! Or try anyway. Is she a big lady, with beautiful . . . eyes?”

“Yes, I’ll do that!” Stallabrass said with another loud sniff. “I’ll show them. I’ll show them all!”

“To love!” Dick held up his glass.

Wil refilled Stallabrass’s glass again and topped it up with a few drops of water. “To true love!” he said, lifting his own to his lips. “Always win in the end. Drink up, ol’ boy!”

“To . . . true love!” Stallabrass emptied his glass all the way to the bottom, and slid off his chair onto the floor.

“Yeah, maybe,” Dick agreed. “But not tonight, I reckon. Yer want a hand to get ’im up to ’is bed?”

“Thank you,” Wil accepted, climbing slowly to his feet. “We’d better put him away nicely.”

“Can’t leave ’im ’ere, like nobody’s child,” Dick agreed, bending down to pick up Stallabrass in a fireman’s lift. “Beggin’ yer pardon, miss,” he said to Judith. “But I think you’d better leave this to us. ’E’s totally rat-arsed. Welcome to the army, Corporal!”

Judith stepped back. There was nothing more for her to do. It was three in the morning, and she had nowhere to sleep except in the ambulance. It would be chilly, but at least it would be dry, and she could lie down.

She woke in the morning to Wil shaking her urgently. She sat up, trying to remember where she was.

“You’d better get straightened up,” he said in a hoarse whisper, as if they could be overheard, although actually there was no one else within fifty yards. The ambulance was parked in a side alley and it was not long after dawn. The cobbles still glistened with dew and the light had the hard, pale clarity of early morning.

She rubbed her hands over her face and pushed her hair back. Her head pounded and there was a vile taste in her mouth. Then she remembered the estaminet, Corporal Stallabrass, and the Pernod! No wonder she felt awful. She had not drank so much, but he had, and she was filled with guilt. How must he feel?

“Get yourself up, sugar!” Wil said firmly. “I don’t think Corporal Stallabrass is going to win any medals today. In fact he just might not be safe to drive at all, and we wouldn’t want the general to end up in the ditch, would we?”

She blushed and cleared her vision with an effort. She must find enough water to wash her face, a comb for her hair, and straighten her uniform so it wasn’t so obvious she had slept in it. Then a hot cup of tea would help her to feel considerably more human. Actually, anything except Pernod would do.

Half an hour later she was standing in the square when General Cullingford came across the cobbles toward his car, beside which stood a bedraggled and deeply unhappy Corporal Stallabrass. He was only too obviously the worse for wear. His uniform looked as if he had put it on in his sleep, which he may well have done, and misjudged most of the buttons.

He attempted to salute, and looked as if he were a drowning man waving for help.

Cullingford stopped, a flicker of disgust crossed his face, then anger. Apparently the smell of alcohol was inescapable.

“Corporal, go and sleep it off,” he said stiffly. “Then when you are sober, report to the duty sergeant for an assignment—not with me!” He turned away and saw Wil about twenty yards across the square, walking toward him with a fresh pastry in his hand.

“Good morning, sir!” Wil said cheerfully. He affected surprise and dawning concern. “Your driver not well?”

Cullingford looked at him coldly.

Wil gave the very slightest shrug. “You need someone?”

“How observant of you,” Cullingford answered. “I don’t believe you speak French.”

“No, sir, I don’t. But I’ve still got Miss Reavley with me, if you like? She knows the ropes, sir.”

“Indeed.” Cullingford took a deep breath. “Then you’d better send her. I have to be in Ploegsteert by eight o’ clock.”

“Yes, sir!” Wil saluted, forgetting the pastry, and turned on his heel to march over to Judith.

CHAPTER

NINE

It was still imperative to Joseph that he learn who had killed Eldon Prentice, even though no one seemed willing to help with anything but the barest information that was so obvious as to be useless. Edwin Corliss remained in military prison awaiting the final verdict on his appeal. Any application of the death sentence was referred all the way up to General Haig himself, regardless of the offense or the circumstances, but the feeling against Prentice for having pushed the issue where Sergeant Watkins would have let it go, prevented anyone now from caring greatly how Prentice himself had died.

There was also his behavior over Charlie Gee’s injuries, although that was less widely known. There was a searing pity for Charlie. Every man understood the horror of such mutilation, and their rage at Prentice’s insensitivity was a release from the fear that it could happen to them. But it was rage, nevertheless, and the medical and VAD staff also were disinclined to give any information to Joseph that might help him discover a truth they were perfectly happy to leave alone.

Still, Prentice had been murdered by one of the British soldiers or ambulance drivers of this division, and he was becoming increasingly afraid that it could have been Wil Sloan. He could not forget Wil’s uncontrolled, almost hysterical violence toward Prentice in the Casualty Clearing Station where he had brought Charlie Gee in, and Prentice had been so callous. If Joseph had not stopped him, he would have beaten Prentice senseless, perhaps even killed him there and then.

Could Prentice have been idiotic enough to have returned to the subject later, in Wil’s presence, and Wil had somehow followed him, or even taken him, out into no-man’s-land on the raid, perhaps on the pretext of looking for wounded? No one else seemed to have any explanation as to how Prentice had got there, or why.

The other alternative he could not escape was that it was one of Sam’s men who was a friend of Corliss.

“Leave it alone, Joe,” Sam said gravely. They were sitting in Joseph’s dugout, sharing stale bread from rations, and a tin of excellent pâté that Matthew had sent in a parcel from Fortnum and Mason’s in London, along with various other delicacies. For dessert they would have some of the chocolate biscuits Sam’s brother sent whenever he could manage to.

“I can’t leave it,” Joseph said, swallowing the last mouthful. “He was murdered.”

Sam smiled lopsidedly. “Aren’t we all!” There was a bitter edge to his voice, the betrayal of a passion he rarely allowed to show through.

“Philosophically, perhaps,” Joseph looked directly at Sam, watching his dark eyes with their sharp intelligence. “But for the rest of us it will be cold, disease, accident, or the Germans, all of which are to be expected in war.”

“You left out drowning,” Sam reminded him. “That’s to be expected, too.”

“Not by having your head held under it.” Joseph heard his own voice crack. He despised Prentice, but it was a horrible thing to think of any man choking in that filthy water with the stench of corpses and rats and the lingering remains of the chlorine gas. He imagined the pressure on the back of his neck forcing him down until his lungs burst and darkness reached up and engulfed him.

Sam winced, as if it filled his mind as well. His face was tight, and the skin pale around his lips. “Don’t think about it, Joe,” he said quietly. “Whatever happened, whoever’s fault it was, they’ll probably be dead, too, before long. Leave it alone. Look after the living.”

“It’s the living I am looking after,” Joe replied. “The dead don’t need justice. They’ll get it anyway, if there’s a God. And if there isn’t, it hardly matters. It’s we who are left who need to keep the rules—for ourselves. At times it’s all we have.”

“You don’t know the rules, Joe,” Sam said quietly. “Not all of them.”

“I know murder is wrong.”

“Murder!” Sam said abruptly, jerking his head up, his eyes wide. “Jesus, Joe! I’ve seen men killed by snipers, shrapnel, mortars, explosives, bayonets, machine guns, and poison gas—do you want me to go on? I’ve skewered young Germans I’ve never even seen before, just because they were in front of me. And I’ve heard our own boys crying in their sleep because of the blood and grief and the guilt. I’ve seen them praying on their knees, because they know what they’ve done to other human beings, that could be ourselves in the mirror, except they’re German. Dozens of them—every day! What rules are there to protect them, or give them back their innocence, or their sanity?”

He stared at Joseph intently, his eyes unblinking, a deep sadness in them for a moment allowing his own vulnerability to show. “Granted it wasn’t a good thing to do, but hunting out whoever it was won’t make it any better now. Morale matters, and that’s your job. We have to survive. The men here need your help, not your judgment. We need to believe in each other, and that we can win.”

Joseph hesitated.

“Leave it, Joe,” Sam said again. “Belief can make the difference between winning, and not.”

“I know.” He stared at the ground. “We all need to have something to believe, or we can’t forget it all. I wish I were surer of what I believe. There aren’t many absolutes, but I’m supposed to know what they are.”

“Friendship,” Sam answered. “The best of yourself that you can give, laughter, keeping going when it’s hard, the ability to forget when you need to. Have another chocolate biscuit?” He held out the packet with the last one left.

Joseph hesitated, then took it. He knew it was meant.

The corporal with the mail arrived, and Joseph went as eagerly as anyone else to see if there was anything for him from home. There were three letters, one from Hannah with news of the village. He could feel her tension through the careful words, even though he knew she was trying to hide it.

The second was from Matthew, telling of having seen Judith, and having visited Shanley Corcoran, and what a pleasure it had been.

The only other letter was from Isobel Hughes. He was surprised she should write again but he opened it with pleasure.

It was a simple letter, quite frank and comfortable, telling him about the farm, how they were having to make do with young women on the land where they had had men before they joined up and went away. She mentioned some of their exploits, and disasters. She had a robust, self-deprecating turn of humor and he found himself laughing, the last thing he had expected to do.

She described the spring fair, the church fête, life as it had always been, but with sad and funny changes, little glimpses of personal courage, unexpectedly generous help.

He read it through twice, and then wrote back to her. Afterward, when it was sealed and posted, gone beyond his recalling, he thought he had told her too much. He had written of his difficulty in trying to convince men that there was a divine order above and beyond the chaos they could see, a reason for all the senseless devastation. He felt a hypocrite saying it when he could give no reason for believing it himself. He should not have said that to her. She had made him laugh for a moment, feel clean and sane in the joy of little things, and he had rewarded her by talking of vast problems of the soul, which she could do nothing about. They would weigh her down, intrude into her grief, which she was trying so hard to control.

She would almost certainly not write again, and he would have lost something that was good.

He went to the hospital as soon as he had the chance, and asked Marie O’Day if the man Wil Sloan had brought in on the night of Prentice’s death was conscious yet.

“Yes, but he’s still in a lot of pain,” she said guardedly. “Are you still after finding out if it really was Wil who brought him all the way?”

“Yes. I’d like to know.”

“Well, don’t push him! If he doesn’t know, he doesn’t,” she warned.

But he did know, and he was happy to tell Joseph at some length how Wil had saved his life, at considerable risk, and how difficult the journey had been. His account was a little garbled, but it was clear enough to show that Wil could not have been anywhere near the length of trench known as Paradise Alley, where Prentice had gone over the top. He had been over a mile away, more like two.

Joseph left with a feeling of intense relief. Wil Sloan could not be guilty. For a moment he stood outside the Casualty Clearing Station in the sun and felt absurdly happy. He found himself smiling, and started to walk briskly back on the way to the supply trench again.

He was halfway along it, dry clay under his feet, rats scattering in front of him with a sound like wind in leaves, when he realized he had inevitably driven himself closer to the fear that it was one of Sam’s men. It was a thought he was not yet ready to face. There were other things he could learn first. One of them was how Prentice had gained permission to go so far forward, and which officer had allowed him to join the raiding party, and on whose orders.

He was in a trench known as the Old Kent Road when Scruby Andrews came limping toward him.

“Gawd, moi’ feet ’urt,” he said with a twisted smile. “Must ’a bin a bloody German wot made moi boots! If oi ever foind ’im, Oi’ll kill ’im wi’ me star naked ’ands, Oi will! Sorry, Captain, but it’s torture.”

“Are you soaping your socks?” Joseph asked with concern. A soldier survived—or not—on his feet. It was an old trick to use bar soap to ease the rough parts of hard wool over the tender skin.

Scruby pulled a face. “Oi should’ve done that better. Barshey Gee says as you’ve bin asking about that wroiter fellow what got drownded out there?” He jerked his hand toward the sporadic sound of machine-gun fire.

“What I really need to know is what he was doing out there anyway,” Joseph replied. “He shouldn’t have been.”

Scruby shrugged. “Shouldn’t ’ave bin a lot o’ things. Didn’t listen, didn’t care, an’ got ’isself killed. Serve ’im roight.” He sat on the fire-step and started to unlace his boots.

“I daresay in a way he deserved it,” Joseph agreed with reluctance. “But which of us can afford what we deserve? I need better, don’t you?”

Scruby looked up and grinned. “You’re roight, Captain, but it don’t work loike that. There’s some rules we gotter keep. If we don’t, there in’t no point. We got nothin’ left. It’s rules what should ’ave kept Jerry out o’ Belgium. It don’t belong to ’im, it belongs to the Belgians, poor sods.” He took his left boot off and rubbed his foot tenderly. “Oi seen an old man wi’ a broken bicycle the other day, tryin’ to push it up the road wi’ a bag o’ potatoes on it, an’ a little girl trottin’ along besoide ’im, carryin’ a doll wi’ one arm.”

His face crumpled up, and he put his foot back in the offending boot, relacing it now loosely. “Oi didn’t loike that bloke, Captain. Bastard, ’e were, but Oi s’pose rules is for them yer don’t loike. Yer won’t ’urt them as yer do. In’t that what God’s about, been fair to them as rubs your coat all the wrong way?”

“Yes, that’s pretty well how I’d put it,” Joseph agreed. “He rubbed my coat the wrong way, too, just about every time I saw him.”

“Oi don’t know for meself what’s true,” Scruby went on thoughtfully. “But Oi ’eard ’e were dead set on goin’ over the top—more so ’e could say ’e ’ad, if yer get me? But ’e swung the general’s name around summink rotten, loike the general were ’is pa, an’ no one ’ad better stand in ’is way. Said ’e ’ad permission, written, an’ all! Load o’ rubbish, if you ask me.”

“Actually the general was his uncle,” Joseph replied. “But I can’t imagine him giving a war correspondent permission to go over the top. I’d like to find out who he went with, exactly, and what this permission amounted to.”

“Oi dunno, Captain. Reckon as you’ll ’ave to ask the general ’isself. Oi don’t see nobody else goin’ to tell you, cos they don’t care.”

Joseph was forced to admit the truth of that. The captain who had led the raid had been killed, and everyone else had claimed that in the dark they couldn’t tell Prentice apart from anyone else. He had been very discreet about it, but he already knew most of the sappers could account for each other. It was with a cold, unhappy doubt gnawing inside him that he finally begged a lift on a half-empty ambulance and went to Cullingford’s headquarters in Poperinge to ask him outright. At this point he would like to have taken Sam’s advice and let it go, but Scruby Andrews was right, if morality were to mean anything at all, it must be applied the most honestly when it was the most difficult, and to protect those everything in you despised.

But when he reached the house just outside Poperinge and asked if he might speak with General Cullingford briefly, Major Hadrian told him that Cullingford was not there.

“You can wait for him, if you’ve time to, Captain, but I have no idea when he’ll be back,” Hadrian said with brief apology. “Can I help you?”

Joseph was undecided. He did not want his inquiries to become the subject of speculation any more than they already were, but how could he decide the question one way or the other if he had not the courage to ask? It might be days before he had the opportunity to speak to Cullingford privately. And whatever he learned, he might have to ask Hadrian for verification anyway.

“Yes, perhaps you can,” he said, choosing his words with care. They were alone in Hadrian’s office; this was as discreet as it was ever going to be. “You may be aware that before his death, Mr. Prentice was keen to gather as much firsthand information as possible about the war.”

Hadrian’s face was pinched with distaste. He stood behind his desk, small and extremely neat, his haircut immaculate, his uniform fitting him perfectly. “Yes, I know that, Captain.” He did not say that it was of no interest to him, it was in his expression. He was intensely loyal to Cullingford, and if Prentice had been an embarrassment to him, he would get no protection from Hadrian.

“He managed to get to several places much further forward than any other correspondent,” Joseph went on. “He claimed to have General Cullingford’s permission. Do you know if that is true?”

Hadrian looked carefully blank, his eyes wide. “Does it matter now, Captain Reavley? Mr. Prentice is dead. Whatever he did, it is not going to be a problem any longer.”

There was no avoiding the truth, except by simply surrendering and going away. He could not do that. “The problem will not completely go away, Major Hadrian,” he replied. “Mr. Prentice did not die by accident. He was killed, and at least some of the men are aware of it. For morale, if not for justice, there needs to be some accounting for it.”

Hadrian frowned. “Justice, Captain?”

“If we do not believe in that, then what are we fighting for?” Joseph asked. “Why do we not simply leave Belgium to her fate, and France, too? We could all go home and get on with our lives. If promises to defend the weak are of no value, why is Britain here at all? Why sacrifice our men, our lives, our wealth on something that was in the beginning essentially not our business?”

Hadrian was stunned. “Are you likening Mr. Prentice to Belgium, Captain Reavley?” His abstemious face was filled with distaste.

“I did not like him, Major Hadrian,” Joseph said. “And I gather you did not either, but that is hardly the point, is it? Most of the men who have died here in this mud had never been to Belgium before, and I daresay some of them couldn’t have found it on the map.”

Hadrian swallowed with a convulsion of his throat. “I take your point, but surely Prentice was killed by a German. If he was out in no-man’s-land, then he was a perfectly legitimate target. Even if he were not, there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it. He shouldn’t have been there.”

“No, he shouldn’t,” Joseph agreed. “Who gave him permission?”

Hadrian colored a deep red. “Is that your concern, Captain? If you feel you owe some kind of explanation to his family, General Cullingford is his uncle, as no doubt you are aware.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, Mr. Prentice was not killed by a German soldier, he was killed by one of our own.”

The color in Hadrian’s face ebbed, leaving him pasty white. “Are you trying to say he was murdered?”

“Yes. Very few men know so far, but I would like to find out the truth and deal with it before they do. I would be obliged for your help, Major. I am sure you can see why. He was not a very pleasant young man, and he caused a certain dislike. People will speculate. I confess, in many ways I am more concerned with protecting the innocent than I am with finding the guilty.”

Hadrian was silent, in acute discomfort.

The cold fear began to tighten inside Joseph until it was a hard knot of pain. If Cullingford had indeed given Prentice permission to go wherever he pleased, then why? It was an unprofessional thing to do. He would not have given such latitude to any other correspondent. Was it family favor, or had Prentice exerted some pressure? He thought of the bawdy laughter and the jokes he had already heard about Cullingford’s replacement driver, the helpless Stallabrass, and his drunken confession to an unrequited passion for his local postmistress. The tale had spread like wildfire through the trenches. They needed to laugh to survive, and teasing was merciless. Every time the mail was brought to anyone within earshot of him, the jokes began.

Joseph also knew that Judith and Wil Sloan had deliberately got Stallabrass drunk so Judith could get her old job back driving Cullingford, and Cullingford had allowed it. All kinds of conclusions could be drawn, accurate or not.

“Did General Cullingford give Prentice written permission to go wherever he pleased?” he said aloud. “That is what he claimed.”

Hadrian stared at him in undisguisable misery. He was obviously trying to decide whether he could get away with a lie, and if he could, what it would be to protect Cullingford.

Joseph put him out of his misery, partly because once he came up with a lie he would feel cornered into sticking to it, however openly he had been exposed. “I do not need to know the general’s reasons for doing so,” he said, meeting Hadrian’s eyes. “Prentice was a manipulative man and not above emotional pressure where he perceived a vulnerability.”

Hadrian’s eyes widened.

“Before anyone makes any suggestions, I’d like to know where the general was on the night Prentice died,” Joseph said firmly.

“You can’t think he’d have anything to do with his death!” Hadrian’s voice rose close to falsetto. There was outrage in it, but it was fear that put it there, not indignation. Joseph was now quite certain that whatever pressure Prentice had used, it had been powerful and effective.

“I don’t,” he said, trying to put more certainty into his voice than he felt. “But we need to be able to prove he had not, Major Hadrian.”

“Yes.” Hadrian swallowed hard. “I was at school with Prentice, Captain Reavley. He was not pleasant, even then. He had a knack for . . . using people. I am not being overly unkind. If you doubt me, ask Major Wetherall. He was at Wellington College also, in my year. Prentice used to keep notes on people then, in his own kind of shorthand. Cryptic sort of stuff. I never learned how to decipher it, but Wetherall was pretty clever, and he worked it out. He told me the sort of thing it was.” Hadrian was stiff, his eyes fixed on Joseph’s. He was apprehensive, and yet he felt he needed Joseph’s cooperation. His anxiety was palpable in the air.

Joseph did not want to know how Prentice had treated his uncle, unless it was absolutely necessary, partly because it concerned Judith. It was a situation that was making him increasingly unhappy. “I didn’t know that,” he said aloud. “Where was the general that night?”

“The telephone lines were particularly bad,” Hadrian replied. “They seemed to be broken in all directions. You’d get someone, and then lose them again before you heard more than a couple of words. Finally around midnight they went altogether. There was nothing to do about it but go along in person. The general went north and east, I went west. You can ask the commanders concerned, they’ll all tell you where he was. Believe me, he was nowhere near Paradise Alley, which I understand is where Prentice was found?”

“Yes, it was. Thank you, Major. You must have been Paradise Alley way then. Did you see Prentice?”

Hadrian was unusually still. “No. I . . . I was held up. My car broke down. I had to jury-rig it—use a silk scarf on the fan belt. Took me the devil of a time. It’s not really my sort of skill. But no choice that time. No one else to ask.”

“I see. Thank you, Major Hadrian.” Joseph was not certain if he believed him, but there was nothing further to be pursued here. There might be a way to find out if he had been where he said, but he did not know of it.

He excused himself and was walking out of the building into the courtyard when the general’s car drove up with Judith at the wheel. They stopped a few yards away. It was already dusk and the shadows were long, half obscuring the outlines of figures. Judith turned off the engine and got out. She was very slender, the long, plain skirt of her VAD uniform accentuating the delicacy of her body, her slightly square shoulders. She moved with grace, intensely feminine. In the headlights her face had the subtlety of dreams in it, and the fire of emotion. She was looking at Cullingford as he got out as well and slammed the door. It was necessary, to make sure the catch held.

He stopped for a moment. He said something, but Joseph was too far away to hear it, his voice was very low. But it was the look in his face that arrested the attention. He can surely have had no idea how naked it was; the tenderness in his eyes, his mouth, betrayed him utterly.

Then he straightened his shoulders, turned and walked over toward the entrance, his easy gait masking tiredness with the long habit of discipline, and disappeared inside.

Joseph moved forward into the pool of the headlights.

She saw him only as a figure to begin with, then suddenly recognition lit her face. “Joseph!” She dropped the crank handle on the gravel and came toward him.

He took her in his arms quickly and held her a moment. It was not perhaps strictly correct, but sometimes feeling was more important than etiquette. The touch of someone you loved, the instant of unspoken communication, was a balm to the raw need, a remembrance of the things that give reason and life to the man inside the shell. He could feel the strength and the softness of her, smell the soap on her skin and the engine oil on her hands. He was so angry with her for being less than she could have been, for twisting Cullingford’s emotions till he was vulnerable to Prentice, and for laying herself wide open to contempt, or worse, that the words choked in his throat.

He pushed her away. “You shouldn’t have done it, Judith!” he said hoarsely. “If it was someone else, I could excuse them that they might not have known any better! But you do!”

“Done what?” Her expression was defensive, but she could not make innocence believable. She tried, but an inner honesty belied it. “What are you talking about?”

He held her at arm’s length. “That doesn’t become you, but if you want it spelled out, you should not have coerced Wil Sloan into helping you get Stallabrass so drunk he lost his job, and you were waiting right there in the wings to take it back again. Do you imagine nobody knows what you are doing? They’re laughing at the poor fool all around Belgium! He can’t get a letter without the men making jokes about the wretched postmistress he’s in love with!”

She bit her lip. “I didn’t know. . . .”

“You didn’t care!” he said furiously, the words pouring out now. “You didn’t think about Stallabrass, he was simply in your way, and you didn’t think about Wil Sloan. You knew he was your friend and would do anything he could to help you. You used him. God knows what you thought you were doing to Cullingford! This war is not for your entertainment, or to make it easier for you to have an impossible romance.”

She was scalded by guilt, perhaps not so much for what she had done, but for the ideas and dreams of what she could do, might do, if opportunity were given her. She had not rebuffed Cullingford and it seemed she had no reservoir of virtue within to draw on, to restrain whatever hunger or need raged inside her.

Instead she picked on the least important detail. “I did not coerce Wil!” she said hotly. “It was his idea!”

“That’s a shabby excuse, Judith,” he told her bitterly. “He’s your friend, and he did it to please you. If you have a passion to do something wrong, at least have the grace to stand by it. Don’t duck behind someone else’s skirts.”

The accusation must have cut her like a whiplash, perhaps because part of it was true or because it was he who made it. “I am not hiding!” she said fiercely. “I was there with Wil! And Stallabrass drank because he wanted to! It’s not my job to baby him!”

“It’s your job to look after anyone who needs it,” he replied without compromise. “You took advantage of Wil’s friendship, of Stallabrass’s ignorance, and of Cullingford’s attraction to you, because you want something that isn’t yours. Is Cullingford the sort of man who can have a love affair with another woman, and walk away from it without guilt, without knowing he had betrayed his wife, and more important than that, the best in himself?” he demanded. “And if he is, is he a man whose attention you want? What for? To prove you can get it?”

“I drive him!” She was raising her voice, possibly without realizing it, anger and guilt harsh in her. “That’s all! You’ve got a rotten, vicious imagination, and as my brother, who’s known me all my life, it makes me sick and disgusted that that’s what you think of me. You think you can step into Father’s shoes? You’re not fit to stand on the same piece of ground!” She took a gasping breath and pushed further away from him. “Go and preach morality to your poor, bloody wounded who can’t escape from you—because I can! And I will!” She turned her back, leaving him alone on the gravel in the encroaching night, weary, angry, and disappointed.

But he could not afford to let it go. He still had no proof that Cullingford had not connived at Prentice’s death, directly or indirectly. The last few minutes had shown how intensely vulnerable he was.

Joseph strode after Judith and caught up with her at the side door to the château. She must have heard his feet on the gravel because she swung around to face him. In the fast graying light he saw the tears in her eyes, but he knew it was anger as much as pain.

“What is it now?” she said between her teeth.

He glanced around to make certain there was no one else within the sound of their voices. There was no point in trying to be diplomatic with her, he had already made that impossible.

“Cullingford gave Prentice written permission to go wherever he wanted to, even onto the front lines,” he said grimly. “No other war correspondent is allowed to do that. It meant none of us would arrest him and send him back, no matter what he did.”

Her eyes blazed at him, her face was set in lines of defiance, but she said nothing, forcing him to continue.

“Prentice must have used pressure on him to force him into that,” he said grimly. “Because of you.”

She gulped. She wanted to say something, anything to defend herself, and Cullingford, but there was nothing. The helplessness burned in her eyes. “He was a bastard!” she said between her teeth. “Is that what you want me to say? You can stand there and be as holy as you like, Joseph, you can blame us all, and feel self-righteous and superior. You can make me feel as rotten and as frightened as you know how to, and you’re good at it. I can’t stop you. But what good does it do? Prentice is dead. You say people are laughing at Stallabrass, and . . . and talking about General Cullingford. Have you come to call me a scarlet woman—which I’m not! Or have you actually got something useful to say?”

He felt as if she had slapped him. His flesh should have been stinging hot. It was startling how deeply words could injure.

“Eldon Prentice was murdered by one of our own men,” he replied in a low, grim voice. “I despised him for lots of reasons, for Edwin Corliss, for Charlie Gee, and for his moral pressure on General Cullingford. But none of those things, repulsive as they are, make his murder acceptable. I need to know who did it, to protect those who didn’t, if nothing else.”

Her voice was husky, her face was paler. “Are you thinking the general did it? He wouldn’t! Prentice was thoroughly rotten, but Cullingford wouldn’t do that, no matter what it cost. You can’t think . . .”

“No I don’t, but that doesn’t matter, Judith. It’s what we can prove.”

“If anybody killed Prentice over his moral blackmail, it would be Hadrian,” she answered almost under her breath. “General Cullingford was far to the north and east of where you were, and that’s easy enough to prove. I know it myself.”

“Of course. No one thinks he crept out in the mud and shell holes himself, in order to push Prentice’s head under the water,” he replied. “I asked Hadrian. He was in the right area. He said he had a breakdown that he fixed with a silk scarf.”

She must have heard the doubt in his voice. “You don’t believe him!” she challenged.

“Do you?” he asked.

She hesitated too long, and realized it. “I don’t know. He could have.”

“But you have no way of knowing,” he reasoned.

“Yes, I have,” she said immediately. “It won’t be difficult to ask the other men who drove the cars if he brought one back with a silk scarf in place of a broken belt. If there was one, somebody’ll know. Then you can check everywhere he says he was, and see if it’s true. You can, Joseph! Cars are too precious around here. We know what happens to each one. Do it!” Her face was keen now, she was leaning a little toward him. “If you really are trying to prove who’s innocent as much as who’s guilty, you can find out about Hadrian.” There was challenge in her voice, and fear in case she was wrong. She was still angry, frightened and deeply hurt that Joseph blamed her, and was forcing her to blame herself.

“I’ll find out,” he replied. “But it doesn’t change anything else. If Prentice gained permission to go forward from Cullingford, by blackmailing him over you, it was you who made that possible.”

“There are times, Joseph, when you are insufferably pompous!” She almost choked on her words, spitting them at him, her fists clenched. “We were all devastated when Eleanor died. It was terrible. She was lovely, and you didn’t deserve to lose her. But you’ve run away from feeling anything since then. You’ve become cold, detached, full of brains and emptyhearted. I’m not always right, but I’m not a coward! I’m not afraid to feel!” And without waiting either to look at him and see what pain she had caused, she swiveled round and stormed into the hallway of the building and through the far door, letting it slam after her.

He walked back outside into the darkness of the fast-falling night, numb inside from the weight of what she had said. She was wrong to stay with Cullingford when she knew he was in love with her, whatever his loneliness or the depth of his need for at least one contact of compassion, laughter, human tenderness, the hunger above all things not to be alone, even if it was only for an hour. An hour led to a day, a week, the ache for a lifetime.

He had meant to speak to her wisely, as their father would have done, in such a way that she would have seen her mistake for herself, and wanted to change it as much as he wanted her to. He had meant to come closer to her, so that in the wrench of giving it up, she would at least know that she had his support, and she was not alone either literally or emotionally.

Instead he had driven her so far away he had placed a barrier between them that he had no idea how to surmount.

But one thing he could do was trace the car Hadrian had used on the night of Prentice’s death, and see if it had broken down as he had said, and he had indeed used a silk scarf to jury-rig it until he got back to Poperinge. He could also check to see if anyone else had seen him at the various points of his journey. It might prove that he could not have been in no-man’s-land at the same time as Prentice.

He had almost completed his task when he spoke to the nurse, Marie O’Day, the following afternoon. It seemed incontrovertible that Hadrian had been where he had said, and Cullingford had certainly been ten or twelve miles in the opposite direction.

“It was a bad night,” Marie told him. “I saw Prentice, but he was alone. Why are you asking about him, Captain Reavley? What is it you need to know? He’s dead. Nobody liked him, and you know why. You were here when he did that to Charlie Gee, poor boy.” Her face twisted with grief at the memory. “It’s nobody’s fault he went over the top. Nobody else made him go!”

“Nobody suggested it?” he pressed. “You don’t know who gave him the idea?”

“Even if somebody egged him on, he didn’t have to do it!” she pointed out.

“Did they?”

“No. He’d already made up his mind when he reached us.” It was a statement of fact and there was no wavering, no overemphasis in her as if she were urging a lie.

“Reached you from where?” he asked curiously. “Where had he come from?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “To the east a little. He was full of himself, said he’d already been right as far as the German wire, and he wanted to go again.”

“Been as far as the German wire?” Joseph was incredulous. Had Prentice really been to another regiment, and gone over the top on a raid with them, and now he wanted to do it again, here? “Are you certain?”

“Oh, yes.” Her face was full of contempt. “He was bragging about it. Said it was exciting and dangerous, a taste of the real war he could write something about that would grab everybody’s attention. He wanted to add going over in a raid to what he already had! Maybe kill some Germans himself, then he could write as an actual soldier and tell people what it was really like, the feel of it, the smell of bodies, the rats, everything as it is, so they’d know.” Her face pinched. “Maybe it’s wicked of me, Captain Reavley, and you being a godly man, but I’m glad he didn’t live to do that.”

He was startled. He had not thought of correspondents writing so graphically. “Yes, I’m glad, too, Mrs. O’ Day. Perhaps I’m not as godly as you think. Thank you for your help.” He left her taking the mugs back inside, a tall, sad figure in a gray dress soiled with blood, busy with the small duties of habit and comfort.

He spoke later to Lucy Crowther, assistant to Marie O’Day. She was rolling bandages on the table in the first-aid station. Her dark hair was tied back severely and her knuckles were clenched and she avoided his eyes. “Yes. He was boasting that he was going over with the men,” she answered his question.

“For the second time,” he said.

She looked up at him. “No. He’d never been over before.”

“He told Mrs. O’Day that he’s been right up to the German wire!”

“Oh, that!” she said dismissively. “Any fool can do that, once the sappers have dug the tunnel!”

“You mean underground!” Again his belief was stretched to snapping.

Her face was twisted with contempt. “Yes, of course. You didn’t think he went on top, did you?”

“He was back here from eastward somewhere,” he asked, trying to piece it together in his mind.

“That’s right. The sappers were working along at Hill Sixty. Major Wetherall and his men. Prentice went that way with them.”

“Prentice went with Major Wetherall?”

“Yes.” She finished the last bandage. “I don’t know how Major Wetherall could stand him, but he can’t have minded or he’d have got rid of him,” she said. “Sappers don’t have to put up with anybody they don’t want to. It’s pretty dangerous, with explosions, cave-ins, water, and all that.” There was admiration in her now, an utterly different tone in her voice, a softness.

Joseph found himself smiling. He knew that what Sam did was dangerous, and vital. If a shell landed anywhere along the tunnel, they could be buried alive, crushed by falling earth, or perhaps worse, imprisoned and left to suffocate. And there was the moral hell of getting so close to the German trenches that you could hear the men talking to each other, the laughter and jokes, the occasional singing, all the daily sounds of life far from home and in intense danger. You could sense the comradeship, the grief for loss, the pain, the loneliness, the whisper of fear or guilt, the hundreds of small details that showed they were men exactly like yourselves, and most of them nineteen or twenty years old as well.

They listened to overhear information. Sometimes they planted explosives to blow up the trench itself. More than once they accidentally broke in on an enemy sap and found themselves face-to-face with Germans doing exactly the same job, with the same fears and the same guilts. Joseph had sat listening to them, because listening was all he could do to help, and his admiration for them was intense. But there was still a sweetness seeing it in someone else. “Thank you,” he said aloud. “Who would know what Prentice actually did do, and what was said, who he finally went with?”

“You could try Corporal Gee. Barshey Gee,” she added, knowing how many Gees there were in the regiment.

He thanked her and went in the darkening air, now louder with gunfire, to look for Barshey Gee.

The gunfire increased, heavy artillery going on both sides. He moved from one stretch of trench to another, past men crouched over machine guns, others waiting, rifle in hand, in case there was a German raiding party coming. Eyes scanned the alternate glare and darkness of no-man’s-land. It was easy to mistake the haggard outline of a tree stump for that of a man.

Then there was a bad hit at Hill 62, and he forgot Barshey Gee, Prentice, or anything else while he helped wounded men, mostly carrying them on his back. No one could carry a six-foot stretcher around the corners without tipping it over.

By midnight it eased off for a while, then there was another flurry, and the expected raiding party came. Star shells lit the sky and the running figures were momentarily silhouetted black. Against the glare bullets ricocheted everywhere. Several men fell, but the attack was beaten off. Two prisoners were taken, white-faced, stiff-lipped, only slightly injured. They looked to be about twenty, fair-haired and fair-skinned. Joseph was sent to talk to them, because of his fluent German, but he learned nothing except their names and regiment. It was all he expected. He would have both despised and pitied a man who gave him more.

It was close to the spring dawn when he finally caught up with Barshey, who was sitting on an empty ammunition crate smoking a Woodbine, oblivious of the blood crusting on his cheek and down his left arm.

“Hello, Reverend,” he said cheerfully. “We won that one, Oi think.”

“Raids are always rough on whoever crosses no-man’s-land,” Joseph agreed, squatting on his heels opposite him.

“Want one?” Barshey offered him a Woodbine.

“No thanks,” Joseph declined. “Do you remember the raid the night Prentice was killed?”

“Who’s Prentice?”

“The war correspondent.”

“Oh, him!” Barshey shrugged. “Rotten little sod. Yes, of course Oi remember it. He didn’t come back. They say he got drowned. Shouldn’t ever have gone, stupid bastard.” He drew in deeply. “Oi told him that, but he was hell-bent on it. He’s been up the saps with Major Wetherall’s men and thought he was a soldier.” His lip curled in contempt. “Full of what he was going to write about it. Tell ’em all at home everything they don’t want to know. Oi moight’ve pushed him in a crater meself, if Oi’d ’a thought of it.”

“I don’t suppose you know who did?” Joseph said casually.

“No oidea.”

Barshey stubbed out his Woodbine and lit another, cupping his hand around the match from habit, even though they were well behind the lines now. “Didn’t you and Major Wetherall go out and look for some o’ them as moight be still alive? You brought Captain Hughes back, didn’t you? He didn’t make it.” He shook his head and his voice dropped. “Pity. He was a good man, even though he was Welsh.”

“Yes. We found Prentice’s body, too.” Joseph said nothing about Hughes, even to defend the Welsh. That was Isobel’s husband, and losing him still hurt.

Barshey shrugged. “Don’t know whoi you bothered risking your neck for that one. He was dead anyway. No point, really.”

“I’d have fetched him if he’d been anyone else,” Joseph said.

Barshey grinned suddenly. “Oi reckon you’re a fool, Cap’n, but it’s a sort o’ comfort. Oi’d loike to think you’d come for me, whether Oi were any good or not. Because sometimes Oi think Oi’m foine, but other days Oi wake up with dead Jerries in moi ’ead, and Oi think of their woives and mothers, and that maybe they’re the ones Oi can hear singing sometimes? Or the ones that left the sausages out there for us, or that yell out asking for the football scores, an’ Oi can’t stand it. Oi need to think there’s someone that’d come for me, no matter what.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were brilliant, hurting with the intensity of his need.

“Don’t think it,” Joseph said softly. “You can be sure I would.”

Barshey nodded, blinking a little. He looked down and squinted into the empty Woodbine packet to hide his feelings, not because he wanted another cigarette. “You know if you want to find out what happened to the stupid bastard, you should ask Major Wetherall. He was with him up the saps ’cos Prentice was bragging about it. Reckoned Wetherall thought he was some kind of soldier. Load of rubbish, if you ask me. Wetherall despoised him. But he came from the saps over to us during the raid, roight across no-man’s-land. More guts than any other man Oi know. He might’ve seen the stupid sod fall in a crater.”

Joseph was cold in the pit of his stomach. “Major Wetherall came across no-man’s-land during the raid?”

Barshey smiled. “Loike Oi said, he’s one on his own.”

It was the one answer Joseph had not thought of: any of the other sappers, Corliss’s friends—but not Sam!

“You all roight, Cap’n?” Barshey said gently. “You look pretty bad. You didn’t get hit, did you?”

“Hit?” Joseph said stupidly.

“Did you get hit—that last raid?” Barshey repeated carefully, searching Joseph’s face. “You all roight? You look koind o’ sick.”

“Just bruised,” Joseph replied. “Bruised inside, I think.”

“Hurts, doesn’t it,” Barshey said sympathetically, even though he was not sure what he was referring to.

“Yes,” Joseph agreed. “Yes, it hurts.” He wished now that he had taken Sam’s advice and not looked. He did not want to know, but you cannot undo knowledge. He knew who had killed Eldon Prentice. Thinking of Corliss still waiting to know if he was going to face the firing squad, perhaps it was not difficult to understand why. Maybe he should have known from the beginning. But he could not let it go just because it wounded him too deeply to deal with the pain of it.

There was no use hesitating. He would like to have avoided facing it altogether, but he knew that was not possible. Scruby Andrews’s words were in his head, and the knowledge of the truth of them would not leave him. It would not now, and he knew it would not later.

At stand-to, Sam would be at his usual place. Breakfast was not the time for such a confrontation, and straight afterward they would both be occupied with other duties. It must be before. There was no choice but to waken Sam now.

He walked slowly along the damp morning earth. The trench walls were studded with beetles. A rat ambled away, unconcerned. He went up the steps and along the supply trench. It was eerily silent just at the moment. Both sides had stopped shooting. He could hear a bird singing somewhere high above in the morning sky of soft, unblemished blue.

He had walked this stretch of Paradise Alley so often he knew every bend and dip in the ground, where the posts and the hollows were. Every other time it had been with a sense of expectancy, even pleasure. Now he had to force himself because delay was pointless. It would change nothing.

He reached Sam’s dugout and stopped. Every scar and nail hole on the wooden surround was familiar. There was nothing on which to knock, but one did not walk into a man’s living quarters at this hour without making some attempt at courtesy.

“Sam!” His voice was rough, as if his throat were dry. “Sam!”

There was silence. Was he relieved or angry that he had to put it off after all? Perhaps Sam was at a very early breakfast? No. Stand-to had not been called yet. Maybe he was asleep. “Sam!” he shouted.

A tousled fair head appeared through the gap in the sacking. “You’re looking for Major Wetherall? Sorry. He was transferred. Some sort of emergency along the line. No idea where.”

Joseph stared at him. He could hardly grasp that this strange, blank-faced man was in Sam’s dugout. Where were all Sam’s things? How could this happen without warning?

The man blinked, recognized Joseph’s insignia of rank and calling.

“Sorry, Chaplain. Not bad news for him, I hope?”

“No,” Joseph said slowly. He took a breath. “No. No news at all, at least not now. Thank you.” He turned away, tripping over a rut in the uneven ground. This was only a respite, it changed nothing, but for the moment he did not have to face Sam and deliberately destroy the friendship that was his lifeline to the laughter, the warmth of human touch, the hand that reached out and grasped his in the inner darkness of this seemingly universal destruction.

CHAPTER

TEN

The same evening as Joseph was talking to Marie O’Day, Judith was sitting in the kitchen of the château. She had been given an excellent dinner, but separately from Cullingford and the senior French officers with whom he had been conferring. She ate the last of the crusty bread, which was still warm, and the fresh Brie, finished her wine, then thanked the cook with an enthusiasm and a gratitude she did not have to feign.

Outside in the garden afterward in the balmy evening under the trees she could hear birdsong and smell the damp earth. To the north the glare of shells was marked against the evening darkness, and the sound grew louder as the firing increased.

Cullingford found her as the last light was fading in the sky. The heavy trusses of the lilac seemed more shadow than substance but the perfume was heady, snaring the senses and wrapping one around.

“Did they give you a good dinner?” he asked quite casually.

She turned in surprise. He was a couple of yards away and she had not heard his feet on the soft grass. “Yes, thank you. Best meal I’ve had in . . . since dining with Mrs. Prentice, actually,”

“What about with your brother, Matthew?” He smiled, his face toward the light, but there was no ease in it, and she thought no happiness. Was it because she had reminded him of his sister, and Eldon Prentice’s death?

“Honestly, I hardly remember what we ate,” she admitted. She wanted to ask him if everything was all right, but that would have been intrusive.

Perhaps he saw it in her face. He put his hands in his pockets, something she had learned he did when he was thinking deeply, and oblivious of his surroundings. It was relaxed, oddly intimate. He started to walk, quite slowly, and she fell into step beside him. Apart from the sound of guns in the distance, they could have been in an English garden, with fields of corn beyond the hedges.

“I have been thinking about what you told me of your father’s death,” he said, pulling a pipe out of his pocket and stuffing it with tobacco. “June twenty-eighth last year. And you said it was because he had discovered a conspiracy, but you didn’t tell me much more. You mentioned your brother’s friend who had actually caused the crash, but you said very little of the man behind it.” He turned to look at her. “He’s still free, isn’t he? And with whatever power and liberty he had before?”

“Yes.” Her voice was tight. The anger and the pain were still there, even the sense of surprise because everything that gave her life sense and value had been destroyed in one act. Perhaps she had deliberately sealed over some of the grieving, making herself too busy to allow it, but it was far from finished. She wanted to share it with Cullingford. He understood loneliness, emotions of horror and loss that form the shape of your mind, so powerful they were beyond control, deeper than words, consuming and too intimate to explain to those who had never felt such things themselves.

He had told his wife nothing of the reality of his own life here in Flanders: the daily, weekly risks, judgments, and duties that were his identity. Then what did they speak of? Household matters, mutual acquaintances, the weather? All that was passion and laughter and pain went unsaid, because she did not know his world, and he did not know hers? The loneliness of not knowing was sometimes like a weight crushing out the power to breathe.

“Yes,” she said again, aware that he was watching her intently, and with a hunger in his eyes that he could not know she read. She did not look at him, but it made no difference; his face was in her mind exactly as if she did, whether first thing on waking or last thing before falling asleep.

“And he won’t stop, just because he failed the first time,” she went on. “Matthew thinks he could be attempting to destroy morale at home to damage recruiting, and prevent Kitchener from raising a new army.” Then she remembered what Belinda had said about Prentice writing articles that would tell the truth about pointless deaths, and how it would affect those who were considering joining up. Perhaps Cullingford was aware of that. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, aware of how family loyalty must tear at him, pity for everything that was too late now. “I don’t suppose Prentice realized what he was doing with his articles. And it would have been censored anyway.”

“My dear, I knew Eldon,” he said gently. “He would not have taken the pains to find out. Too many men are dying now for us to pretend they were all good. That is a facet of decency that belongs to peacetime. Those of us who don’t have to make decisions can indulge in dreams, but those of us who do cannot afford to. Please tell me what you know about this . . . creator of peace, at the price of slavery and dishonor,” he asked.

In the growing dark she told him, as they walked along the paths which were now a little wild, since the gardening boys had been called up to the war. The unheeding earth had blossomed with its usual verdure as if oblivious that only miles away it was being poisoned and laid waste.

She had already told him something of the events themselves, and the search afterward as the fragments of meaning had come together, until finally, with Europe on the brink of war, they had discovered the conspiracy itself.

“Your father was a brave man,” he said quietly when she had finished. “I wish I could have known him.”

She was furious with herself because the tears filled her eyes and her voice choked when she tried to speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said with deep contrition. He put his pipe away and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He handed it to her.

She took it, wiped her eyes, which was almost useless, then blew her nose fiercely. She stood holding the handkerchief. She could hardly give it back to him now.

“I think Eldon may have been involved in the same thing,” he said thoughtfully. There was immense sadness in his face, but he did not flinch away from the knowledge. “I’ve thought about some of the things he said to me last time I was on leave. He boasted about changing things. He often did that, as young men will, but he seemed surer of himself than before, as if he were speaking of something specific.”

She said nothing.

He pulled on his pipe slowly and let out the smoke. She could smell it in the damp air.

“We had one of the stupid arguments we had so often. He hated the army and everything to do with militarism, as he called it. He said there was a better way than violence, way of peace and government that would supersede petty nationalism, and that I was fast becoming an anachronism, and I’d see!” He was standing still, the pipe in his hand almost as if he were not quite sure what to do with it. The light reflected on the polished wood of the bowl. “I thought he was just bragging at the time, but looking back, I think he knew what he was saying.”

She turned to look at him, and he averted his eyes, even though in the twilight she could barely have read the expression in them. She knew it was shame, because he read Prentice so easily, the shallow and the vulnerable in him, the child that had needed to impress, and the man who had embraced an evil to do so, perhaps without recognizing it. She looked back at the trees against the sky, now little more than shadows in the afterglow.

“I saw photographs of him,” she said quietly. “At a regatta. You were there. He looked young and eager, sort of excited, as if everything good lay ahead of him. I suppose there are thousands of young men like that. People must look at those pictures now, and . . .” She could not go on. She was hurting both of them, and it was pointless.

He put out his hand and touched her arm, his fingers strong, a steadying grip, just for a moment, then withdrawn again.

“There was a young woman as well,” she said, to fill the silence.

“I don’t remember,” he answered.

“She was unusual, very tall,” she elaborated. “Dramatic eyes. They were pale, as if they might have been light blue or green.” Then a memory came back to her of Hannah using the same words.

She stopped abruptly and swung back to face him, her heart pounding. “I think I know how the instructions were given to Sebastian to murder my parents! It couldn’t have been a letter—you don’t put that sort of thing down on paper. Anyway, you’d have to be certain that Sebastian was going to do it. You could hardly wait for him to write back! It had to be a conversation. Matthew said he didn’t have a telephone call, except from Mr. Thyer at St. John’s, and that was only a few moments. But he did meet a young woman in one of the local pubs.” She was speaking more and more rapidly, her voice rising with excitement. “Hannah saw her! She was tall, with amazing light eyes! Of course it doesn’t have to be the same woman, but it could have been! She might have drawn Prentice into it as well!”

Cullingford was staring at her, amazed, vulnerable, strangely naked in the last shreds of the light no more than a warmth in the sky. “Yes,” he agreed gently. “Yes, it could. I’m going to London tomorrow. Just a couple of days. I’ll look into it. See who she was.”

She was surprised. He had said nothing about it before. She was startled how fiercely she would miss him, even for so short a time. She took the handkerchief out of her pocket and offered it back to him.

He laughed a little shakily. “Keep it,” he said, reaching out very gently to touch her cheek with his fingers. “Be here when I get back. Please?”

“Of course I will!” The words were awkward, her throat aching so savagely she could barely swallow.

He leaned forward and kissed her, softly, on the mouth, hesitating a moment, then more fully. Then he let her go and turned to walk toward the house, without looking back.

Cullingford was in London by half past eleven. First he went to see Abigail Prentice. It was a stiff, highly emotional meeting, neither of them able to bridge the gulf of pain between them.

“Hello, Owen,” she said with as much warmth as she could manage. There was an awkwardness in her that could not totally forgive him because he was a professional soldier, a man who had deliberately given his life to fighting, a thing she could not understand, and here he was, alive. Her son who fought with his mind and his beliefs, whose only weapon was the pen, had been drowned in no-man’s-land, and buried where she could not even visit his grave. She had not been there to comfort him, or to mourn.

“Hello, Abby.” He kissed her fleetingly on the cheek. It was all she offered him.

“Are you home on leave?” she asked, going ahead of him into the sitting room.

“A couple of days,” he replied.

“I thought as a general you would have been able to have longer.” She sat down in the old armchair near the fire. There were early yellow roses in a vase on the table. They were still in bud, short-stemmed, picked from the climber over the arbor in the garden. In a couple of weeks they would be glorious. “I suppose they can’t manage without you,” she added, both pride and resentment in her voice.

He wondered if he was sitting where Judith had sat when she was here. He glanced at the familiar room, the photographs of Prentice, one or two of himself, not many. There were several of Belinda, some of Abby and her husband. Then he saw the one Judith had referred to. He remembered the occasion. It was Henley, as she had supposed. It had been a hot day, dazzling sun on the water. There were young men in light trousers, straw boater hats, striped blazers, girls in dresses that were self-consciously nautical, or else all muslins and ribbons, and parasols against burning in the sun. The hallmarks of the day had been laughter, cold lemonade and beer and champagne, picnic hampers filled with fruit and sherbet, pheasant in aspic, and cucumber sandwiches.

And there was Laetitia Dawson with the startling eyes, almost as tall as Cullingford, a fraction taller than Prentice, but the young man had been fascinated by her. Had his involvement with the Peacemaker begun even there, the first introduction to the seductive and terrible ideas?

Was it she who had given Sebastian Allard his final, murderous instructions also?

“Would you like tea?” Abby asked.

“Thank you,” he accepted, simply because it would be easier than sitting here doing nothing, and he would not go so soon.

“Will you stay to lunch?” she added.

“No, no thank you. I have to get into the city and see various people.”

“Thank you for sending Miss Reavley,” she went on awkwardly. “That was thoughtful of you. She was very nice. She spoke well of Eldon.”

He pictured Judith here in this room, struggling for something kind to say, just as he was now. She had loathed Prentice and despised his insensitivity toward men for whom she cared with an almost unbearable tenderness. Thinking of her his heart raced, the room became too small, too imprisoning. He wanted to be back in Flanders, even with the violence and the grief, the noise and fear and dirt. In Flanders were the people he loved and the causes he understood.

“Good,” he said aloud. “I’m glad she was of some help.”

“Nothing helps, Owen,” Abby answered. “I am just acknowledging your thought.”

“Abby, I did not send him into no-man’s-land,” he told her. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but she was too stiff, too fragile, and he did not dare. “He took his chances, like any young man,” he went on. “If you are angry with everyone who lives, because he didn’t, you are going to hurt yourself intolerably. There are casualties in war, just as there are in life. We do the best we can, the best we understand. Sometimes we are wrong. Eldon was following his belief. Don’t blame other people for that.” He was lying to her. Hadrian had told him that Eldon had been murdered, which was different from war. But he had given many people sufficient cause to hate him, and Cullingford had no idea which of them had been offered the chance and taken it. He could not blame Charlie Gee’s brother, if it had been he, or Edwin Corliss’s friends. But there was no need for Abby to know that. She had grief enough.

She was staring at him, waiting, wanting to quarrel and not knowing if she dared to. The anger needed to spill out, but not at him.

He stood up slowly. “We haven’t time to waste on hate, Abby,” he said very softly. “Hold on to the good you have, while you have it. Time is so precious, and so short.”

The tears spilled over her cheeks. Awkwardly, as if it were a gesture he had never made before, he knelt down in front of her and took her in his arms.

He had already given the subject considerable reflection, and he knew which friend he would speak to regarding the idea that was taking greater shape in his mind the longer he considered it. It made a hideous sense. If what he learned next fitted in with what Judith had told him, the identity of the Peacemaker was certain.

He walked along Piccadilly in the sun with a sense of dreamlike unreality. It all looked exactly the same as it had a year ago, and yet it was indefinably shabbier. Part of it was in the dress of the women. There were no bright colors, no reds, no oranges or hot pinks, as if they would be crass in the face of so many people’s mourning.

Perhaps there were rather fewer horses and more cars, which might have had to do with the war, or simply the progress of time. Newsboys stood on the corners. There was nothing different: casualty figures from Flanders, France, Gallipoli; bits of news from other regions such as Africa and the Mediterranean. Oddly enough there were still theater flyers advertising musicals, dramas, the latest entertainment, and of course moving pictures.

He stopped to take his bearings for a moment, then crossed the street and went into a large block of flats, each one like a smart town house, with entrance foyer and a suite of rooms.

Gustavus Tempany was expecting him. He was at least fifteen years older than Cullingford. He was tall and thin, limping from the wound that had invalided him out of the Indian army ten years ago. He still stood like a soldier. His thoughts and dreams were with the men in France, but his own days of battle were over.

He welcomed Cullingford and offered him whisky, in spite of the hour, but he was not surprised when it was declined.

“Well?” he said gravely, looking at Cullingford where he sat opposite him, legs crossed as if he were relaxed, trying to appear casual. “Don’t play silly beggars with me, Cullingford. Something’s eating at you, or you wouldn’t be here. This is not time for tittle-tattle.”

“Do you know Laetitia Dawson?” Cullingford asked bluntly.

Tempany’s eyes opened very wide, but he did not make any obvious comment. “Of course.”

“Do you know what she is doing these days?”

“Socially? No idea. Don’t care much about these things.” Very carefully he did not ask why on earth Cullingford should be interested in such a superficial matter. He frowned. “Is it important?”

“It could be. She’s still in London? Hasn’t married, gone abroad, or anything?”

“No. Saw her at a dinner at the Savoy a couple of weeks ago, or perhaps it was three.”

“Who with? Do you remember?”

“Somebody’s brother. All very casual,” Tempany replied.

Cullingford saw the curiosity in him, and smiled. He could have trusted his discretion, and his honor, but if Judith was right, such knowledge was dangerous, and Tempany had been his friend too long and too deeply to risk his safety.

“Can you put me in touch with anyone who knows her currently?” he asked.

“Cullingford, are you sure you know what you are doing?” Tempany said anxiously. “She won’t be up to anything questionable, you know! You do know her family connections—who her uncle is?”

“Yes, I do. Please—it’s important.”

“Well if you must, I think she actually lives quite a bit of the time up near Cambridge. Family home, you know?”

“Yes, I know.”

“You could try one of the young scientists up at the Establishment there. Can’t remember the fellow’s name, but supposed to be brilliant. All very secret stuff. War effort, and all that. Is that what you’re after?”

Cullingford did not answer. It was fitting together too easily: Laetitia Dawson with first Eldon; presumably he had been the first? Then the message to Sebastian Allard. Now there was some young scientist in Cambridge. The connection was perfect. The passion was there, the idealism, the power. He would have to go up to Cambridge, of course. Every step needed proving, but he did not expect any difficulty. A society photograph of Laetitia was easy enough to find out of the Tatler. He would show it in the pub that Judith’s sister had spoken of, and the chain would be complete.

He had a quick meal at the railway station, and went to Cambridge on the afternoon train, arriving a little after three. Fortunately the day on which John and Alys Reavley were killed was one that would be remembered in England as long as recorded history lasted. That day an assassination had occurred in the Balkans that had precipitated the last hectic plunge toward a war which seemed as if it must be the end of the world as Europe knew it, and the beginning of something unknown, perhaps swifter, darker, and immeasurably uglier.

It did not take long for him to find a driver to take him to the village, and the public house where Hannah had said Sebastian and Laetitia Dawson had been seen.

“A fine lookin’ lass, all right,” the publican agreed, looking from the picture to Cullingford with respect. He was in uniform, as thousands of other men were, but in his case because he had not had time, or inclination, to go home. He wanted to deal with this matter first, and if he was honest, he had no desire to see Nerys, and be obliged to put on the mask that for her sake hid his feelings. It was an effort he was uncertain he could sustain, and he was too tired, too emotionally raw to try.

“Do you remember her?” Cullingford asked patiently.

“Don’t see ’er much these days,” the publican replied. “Busy, I s’pose. Most folk are.”

“I am trying to understand an event that happened a little under a year ago, in order to clear someone of a certain blame,” Cullingford elaborated with something of a slant to the truth. “I’m sure you remember the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand . . .”

The publican rolled his eyes. “Do I ever? Hardly goin’ to forget that!”

“I imagine no one is,” Cullingford agreed. “Did you see this woman the day before that?” He remembered Judith’s description of Sebastian Allard. “She may have been in the company of a young man, tall also, very good-looking indeed, fair brown hair, sunburned, looked like a poet, a dreamer.”

The publican smiled. “Oh yeah! I remember him. Right handsome, he was. Odd, because I’ve never see’d ’im since. I s’pose he’s gone to war—like most of ’em.” His face flooded with sadness and he blinked several times. He polished the glass in his hand so hard he was fortunate not to snap it. “I’d like to think ’e weren’t killed. ’E had such a look to ’im, as if ’e were alight with something inside ’isself.” He shook his head. “An’ it weren’t love, like you see all the time in young folk. It were bigger than that, like you said, a dream. An’ ’e and she were friendly, but no more’n that. An’ she were proper ’andsome, too, but a bit tall for a girl, to my taste. Does that ’elp you?”

“Yes,” Cullingford said quickly. “Yes, thank you.” It was what he needed to know. He would take it to Matthew Reavley. It was his task to know how to arrest the Peacemaker, or what else to do about him. But at least now he would know who he was. His power would be curtailed forever. Perhaps they would do something discreet, no open accusation, certainly no trial.

He thanked the publican again and gave him a handsome tip for his time, then he walked outside into the sun.

Did people commit suicide out of honor anymore, if they were found in treason? Certainly the government could never let it be known. Would someone offer him a sword or a gun? It would be the best way.

The driver was waiting for him, and he went back to the station to catch the next train to London. He should have thought to ask Judith for Matthew’s address, but he had not wanted to tell her what he intended to do. Any questions, and she might have guessed. Now he would have to telephone one of his friends in the Intelligence Services and ask. It was only a temporary setback.

The journey back from Cambridge was very pleasant. He let himself drift off into sleep. He woke with a start to find himself already on the outskirts of the city. He would have to find a hotel tonight, and perhaps go home tomorrow. Time to face that decision when he had to.

It was nearly seven o’clock and already the light was fading when he walked along the platform under the vast ceiling and out into the early evening air. It was warm, a softness to it as if summer were almost here.

He realized how hungry he was and looked for a restaurant to find a decent meal before going to see Matthew Reavley. Matthew was a young man, unmarried. There was no reason why he should be at home early, or for that matter, at all! Still, he must try, even if it took him all night, and he had to go to the SIS offices tomorrow. But tonight would be better for all sorts of reasons. It must be done in absolute privacy, where no one at all could overhear even a word. And Matthew might take considerable convincing that the Peacemaker was indeed who Cullingford now knew him to be.

The other main reason was that he wanted to do it urgently. Every hour the Peacemaker was free to make more plans, betray more people, might mean the deaths of other men, and bring defeat closer.

After dinner he made a single telephone call, and obtained the information he wanted. He hailed a taxi, and gave the driver an address a couple of hundred yards from Matthew’s street. It was almost certainly an unnecessary caution, but he still did not wish Matthew’s address known, even to a cabdriver, who might well remember a passenger in a general’s uniform.

It was nearly ten when they fought their way through the traffic and he finally paid his bill and alighted. The evening was still warm, but it was completely dark now, and the streetlamps lit only pools like a string of gigantic pearls along the footpath.

Around the corner in the side street they were further apart. It was dark between them. He noticed a man standing a few yards beyond the lamp nearest where he judged Matthew’s flat to be. He was on the curb, as if hoping to hail a taxi. He could not be waiting to cross because there was no reason why he should not. The street was silent. He hoped it was not Matthew himself! He was wearing a topcoat and hat, and carrying a stick. It was difficult to tell how tall he was. The shadows elongated him.

He turned just as Cullingford reached him, as if the sound of his footsteps in the quietness had drawn his attention. For a moment the light shone in his face, and he smiled.

“Good evening, Cullingford,” he said softly. “I assume you have come to see Reavley. That’s a pity.”

Cullingford stared into the face of the Peacemaker, twisted with regret but without a shadow of indecision.

He actually saw the lamplight on the blade of the swordstick, then the next moment he felt it in his body, a numbing blow, not sharp at all, just a spreading paralysis as he fell forward into the darkness.

Joseph was sitting in his dugout, writing letters, when Barshey Gee came in without knocking. His face was white and he stared at Joseph without even an attempt at apology.

Joseph dropped his pen and stood up. In two steps across the earth floor he was in front of Barshey. He took him by the shoulders. “What is it?” he asked, his voice gravelly, steeling himself for the news that one of Barshey’s brothers had been killed. It had to be a sniper, at this time in the afternoon. “What is it, Barshey?” he repeated.

Barshey gasped. “Oi just ’eard, Captain. General Cullingford’s been murdered! In London. ’E were home on leave, an’ some thief stuck a knife into ’im in the street. Jesus, Oi hope they hang the bastard!” He struggled for breath, his chest heaving. “What’s ’appenin’ to us, Captain Reavley? How can someone kill a general in the street?” His eyes were wide and strained. “Jeez, you look as bad as Oi feel!”

Joseph found his mouth dry, his heart pounding, not for himself but for Judith. It was like the past back again, death where you had never even imagined it, like your own life were cut off, but you were left conscious with eyes to see it, forced to go on being present and knowing it all. The end of life, but without the mercy of oblivion.

Judith was going to hurt so much! Cullingford was not her husband, but that had nothing to do with the pain she would feel. It was still love! It was laughter, understanding, gentleness, the hunger of the soul met with generosity and endless, passionate tenderness. It was the voice in the darkness of fear, when the world was breaking, the touch that meant you were not alone. She would grieve till she felt there was nothing left inside her. Then rest would restore her, and she would have the strength to hurt all over again.

“Thank you for telling me, Barshey. I must go to Poperinge, now! Help me find a car, an ambulance, anything!”

Barshey did not argue—he simply obeyed.

An hour later Joseph was at the ambulance post in Poperinge. First he went to Hadrian. He must be certain of the details. He even cherished some vague, ill-defined hope that Barshey had been wrong.

He had not. Hadrian was numb with shock, but he told Joseph that it was true. It had happened at night, in the same street where Matthew lived.

Joseph left Hadrian and went outside and across the cobbles to where he could see Judith and Wil Sloan standing together laughing. They must have heard his boots on the stone, because they turned to look at him. The laughter died instantly.

Judith came forward, the blood draining from her skin as she stared at him.

He put both his hands on her shoulders. She waited, knowing from his eyes that the blow would be terrible. Perhaps she expected it would be Matthew.

“Judith,” he began, his voice catching in his throat. He had to clear it before he could go on. “General Cullingford was murdered in the street in London—just outside Matthew’s flat. They didn’t find who did it.”

“What?” It was not that she had not heard him, simply that she could not grasp the enormity of it.

“I don’t know any more than that. I’m sorry! I’m so very, very, sorry!”

“He’s . . . dead?”

“Yes.”

She leaned forward and buried her head on his shoulder and he tightened his arms around her until he held her as close as he could. It was a long time until she started to weep, then her whole body shook as if she would never get her breath, never ease the rending pain.

He kept on holding her. Wil stood where he was, horrified, helpless.

At last she pulled away. Her eyes were shut tight, as if she could not bear to see anything. “It’s my fault,” she whispered hoarsely. “He went after the Peacemaker, because of what I told him! I killed him!”

He pushed the hair off her face. “No,” he said very softly. “The war killed him.”

She leaned against him again, very still now, too exhausted to cry again, for the moment.

He just held on to her.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

There was nothing Joseph could do to ease Judith’s grief. She had to hide it from everyone except those closest to her, such as Wil Sloan, and possibly Major Hadrian. To permit its true depth to be seen by others would in a sense betray Cullingford’s privacy, and perhaps his reputation. A new general was moved forward immediately, with his own driver, and she was returned to ambulance duty. It took a matter of hours, not days. War waited for no one.

Joseph knew that after that first brief and terrible encounter he would not see her again except by chance. He had been on or near the front line for weeks without leave and the stress was telling on him. He was due two weeks now, and he accepted it gratefully. Apart from anything else, it was important that he speak to Matthew as soon as possible. He believed Judith’s assertion that it was the Peacemaker who had murdered Cullingford, either directly or indirectly, which meant that he had to have been close to finding him.

Watching the late spring countryside skim past him on the way to Calais, it seemed like an escape from the reality of mud and wasteland. Here the trees were in full leaf. At a hasty glance, the French farms and villages looked as they always had: uniquely individual, yet steeped in history, each with its own vines, cheeses, and livestock. It was afterward, on the boat across the Channel, that he realized he had seen only women, children, and old men. When they stopped to buy petrol or bread, there was a sadness in people’s faces, and always a shadow behind the eyes, a knowledge of fear, probably not for themselves but for those they loved.

London was startlingly the same as before. After the loss of men he had expected a silence, some kind of mourning he could see, but it was full of traffic as always, motor and horse-drawn. There were men in uniform, some on leave as he was, some injured, hollow-faced with the gray pallor of the shell-shocked or inwardly crippled. He heard a man with a hacking cough; it was probably no more than a spring cold, but to him it brought back, with skin-chilling horror, the memory of gas.

He reached Matthew’s flat a little after six, and the porter, knowing him well, let him in. He bathed, letting the hot water soak into his skin, although it stung the scratches where he had torn himself with his nails when the lice or fleas became unbearable. The bone-deep ease of it made him realize how tired he was, how many nights he had lain on the hard clay, or on duckboards, and slept fitfully. It was going to be strange to sleep in a bed with sheets, and waken knowing he was in England. It would seem eerily silent with only the distant sound of traffic, no gunfire, no shaking of the ground as the fourteen-pounders landed. No injuries, no deaths.

He toweled himself dry, examining the scraped and abraded patches of his skin, and dressed, borrowing clean underwear from Matthew’s drawer. Then he made himself a pot of tea and sat down to wait.

Matthew came in a little before nine. The porter must have told him of Joseph’s arrival because there was no surprise in his face. He pushed the door shut behind him and hesitated only a moment before flinging his arms around Joseph and hugging him briefly and fiercely. Then he stood back, looking him up and down. “Hell, Joe, you look awful! And you’re thin . . .”

“You know about Cullingford?” Joseph asked.

The joy in Matthew’s face vanished. “Yes, of course I do. It was only a few yards from here, practically on my doorstep. He was the one Judith drove, wasn’t he? Is she all right?”

Joseph found himself torn with all kinds of emotions. A few days ago he had been furious with her, so certain that regardless of temptations, she was morally wrong. Now nothing was so certain. He understood the darkness where, without a human touch, you drown. Perhaps Cullingford had needed that to survive, whether Judith did or not. Who else could he turn to? Not his wife in England, certainly not his junior officers. Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.

“I don’t know,” he answered Matthew. “She loved him.”

Matthew’s eyes flickered wider open. “I didn’t know that!”

Joseph shrugged. “It’s not only that,” he went on. “She told him about the Peacemaker, all she knew.” He saw Matthew’s start of surprise. “Apparently Prentice was something of an idealist as well, with a lot of the same beliefs, and a driving compulsion to do something about them. Judith’s convinced Cullingford found the Peacemaker and that’s why he was killed, which to her makes it her fault!”

Matthew sat down slowly in the largest chair, running his hands through his hair, scraping it back off his brow.

“Oh, God! You mean he was on his way here to tell me when they caught up with him?”

“Probably.” Joseph sat opposite him.

“I think it’s Ivor Chetwin.” Matthew looked up at him. “Everything I have points to him. He has the knowledge, the political ability, the family connections in England, and we know he has the brains.” He pushed his hair back, dragging it off his brow. “It’s absolutely bloody, because he knows our codes in SIS, and other things I can’t tell you! I just need a few last details from a fellow called Mynott, who used to be a military attaché at the embassy in Berlin before the war. That should settle the last doubts there are. Unfortunately he’s ADC to Hamilton out in Gallipoli. I’ve got a berth on a troopship leaving tomorrow night. But you can stay here, as long as you like! Thank God at least Mynott wasn’t a naval attaché, or I’d never find him. I’m sorry, Joe, but I’ve got to go out and ask him the last questions. He knows for sure what Chetwin was doing in Berlin. If he knew Reisenburg, that’ll be enough.”

It twisted inside Joseph that it should be Chetwin, for his father’s sake, but it had to be someone he had known, or at least had known him. He knew Matthew had even feared it was Shearing himself. Joseph had been afraid it was Aidan Thyer. There was no answer that would be painless, and after Cullingford’s death, there was a new bitterness to it.

Matthew stood up and poured himself a generous glass of whisky. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever prove that. But I’ll be happy to see Chetwin swing high just for Mother and Father.” He drank the glassful in one draft. “Do you want some?”

“No.” He looked at Matthew with anxiety. He seemed to have drunk the whisky with unusual ease. A few months ago he would have sipped it, made it last the evening.

Matthew turned back to look at him, the glass still in his hand. He frowned. “Exactly what did she tell Cullingford, Joe? How could he find the Peacemaker in a couple of days when we haven’t in a year?”

“What’s the connection between Chetwin and the woman who spoke to Sebastian in the pub the day before he killed Mother and Father?” Joseph asked.

“I’ve no idea. Could be anything: relatives, lover, disciple, possibly just a paid messenger, a mercenary. If we get him, she won’t matter.”

“That’s how Cullingford trailed him, I think.” Joseph tried to remember exactly what Judith had said. She had been certain it was her fault, and he thought it was not hysteria but a deep and terrible knowledge. “There was a photograph of Prentice in his mother’s home that Judith saw when she was there, taking Cullingford’s condolences, as it were,” he explained. “Prentice was with a young woman who answered pretty closely to the description of the woman Hannah says was seen with Sebastian the day before the murders. If it was the same woman, perhaps Cullingford knew who she was, and knew her connection to the Peacemaker.”

“Then go to Mrs. Prentice tomorrow and look at the photograph!” Matthew said urgently. “I can’t, I have to go on the early train to Portsmouth in time to get on board the troopship. Look at the picture, and for God’s sake, Joe, do nothing! Just remember what the woman looks like, and get out.” He finished the whisky, pulling a face as if he disliked the taste of it. His voice was hoarse, fear in his eyes, and more emotion than he could control. “I don’t want to come back from Gallipoli and find you dead, too.” He tried to smile. “Apart from anything else, what would I tell Judith? Just go and tell Mrs. Prentice that you were the man who brought her son back, and buried him. Say something nice about him. . . .”

“Matthew!” Joseph exclaimed. “I understand! I’ll just look at all the photographs of Prentice, then I’ll come back here. I may go home for a few days, see Hannah. . . .” He saw Matthew’s face fill with alarm. “And I won’t go asking questions in any pubs! I swear!”

He was prevented from any further persuasion by the telephone.

Matthew stood up to answer it. He listened in silence for several moments, his body rigid, his hand holding the mouthpiece shaking a little, then he said “Yes, sir,” and replaced it on the hook. “That was Shearing. The Germans have sunk the Lusitania,” he said with a gasp. “Over eleven hundred people drowned, including Americans. I’m . . . I’m sorry, Joe, but I’ve got to go in to the office. Washington can’t overlook this! It could turn the war!”

Joseph was stunned. “The Lusitania! I thought that was a passenger liner! How could that happen? Where?”

“The Irish Sea. It is a passenger liner, and I don’t know how it could happen, just that it did.”

“What about Chetwin . . . and Gallipoli?”

“I can’t go. Can you?”

“Me?” Joseph was startled.

Matthew’s face was white. “If you don’t go to Gallipoli, and I can’t, and Mynott’s killed before he can give us the proof, then the Peacemaker goes on, and England loses the war.”

Joseph leaned forward, head in his hands. “All right. I’ll go in the morning,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Matthew said with sudden gentleness. “I know you haven’t had leave in months, and God knows, you deserve it. But I can’t trust anyone else.”

“I know,” Joseph agreed. “I’ll be all right. Tell me about Mynott, and what I need to do.”

The sea journey was, as Matthew had said, roughly three days, steaming at full speed south through the Straits of Gibraltar, then east across the Mediterranean. The weather was perfect, blazing sunshine and warm, blue seas.

At first Joseph was glad simply to sleep as much as cramped and shared accommodation allowed him to. The ship was full of men going out to fight on the beaches and landings at Gallipoli, and they must have heard of the storm of casualties there already. Many of them would not come home, and most of them who did would have sustained injury and loss.

Joseph made himself available to offer what support and encouragement he could, but they were raw recruits, and he had already seen nearly a year of war in the trenches of the Western Front. It was better he tell them nothing. There were truths too overwhelming, too shattering to the mind and the hope, to be faced all at once. A step at a time was all the mind could bear. He thought it was not cowardice that kept him silent when he heard their laughter and their talk of heroism in battle, of honor and sacrifice and the glory of courage.

The Dardanelles were among the great legendary places of the world, a crossroad for the nations of history: Persia, Judea, Greece, Rome, Islam, and the vast empires of the East beyond. Alexander the Great had left Greece to conquer the ancient realms of India and Egypt. Xerxes had crossed the Dardanelles in his attempt to crush the rising Athens. Leander had swum the Hellespont to be with Hero, and died for love. And in the mists of time Homer’s Greeks had come that way bound for the siege of Troy: Helen, Menelaus, Achilles, and Odysseus on his long return to Ithaca.

In even older dreams, Jason and the Argonauts had pursued the Golden Fleece through these same straits up into the Black Sea.

Now he heard young Englishmen talking of it as if this were another great heroic saga, and they would return with the honor of war. He stared across the dancing blue water, and felt his eyes sting with tears. He, too, had grown up with the poetry of the wine-dark seas of Homer flowing through his dreams. He had wanted to walk the ruins of Troy in the magic light of the Mediterranean, hear in the silence of the wind in the grass the echoes of the wars between men and gods that laid the dreams of Western man and built the cities and laws, the philosophies and poems, upon which Europe had nourished its heart for two thousand years.

And he would see it, but now it would be amid the slaughter of today, and perhaps out of it he would find the truth of a betrayal he had to know, however much he did not want to.

The ship dropped anchor in the Aegean Sea, north of the Dardanelles, opposite the landing beaches of Anzac Cove. All the men crowded to the side to stare at the shore and the pale, steep hills behind, jagged right down to the shore. The bay was dotted with ships, but far out, beyond the firing range of the Turkish artillery from the fortresses and placements on the crown of the ridge above. Men crowded the beaches, hundreds of them, wounded and sick waiting to be escorted out to hospital ships. Medical orderlies were trying to help, fighting units huddled under the brief stretch of rocks and outcrops, making a slow and bloody way upward, surrounded by fire on all sides except the sea.

Joseph had told the commander that he was on Secret Intelligence Service work, backed up by the documents Matthew had given him. He was quite open that he was here to find a particular officer who might have information, but he did not give any name, until he was on the tender, making its way through the pale Aegean. The water should have been a limpid blue, but here it was turgid with sand, and blood, and the dark figures of men struggling to help the wounded into makeshift carriers of any sort, just to get them off the beach.

Above in the distance the Turkish guns occasionally raked the sea with shot, but most of the boats were just out of range, and the warships returned fire with a roar of shelling.

The score of men in the same boat with Joseph were huddled together, pale and excited, wanting to appear brave and not having any idea what to do. The fact that they wanted to do anything at all made their innocence heartbreakingly obvious. Seasoned men would have been happy to do nothing, knowing the time would come.

The prow of the boat scraped the sand and the foremost men leaped out. Joseph scrambled ashore with them. The water was warm and the sand soft under his weight. He ran through the gentle surf and floundered up to a pile of ammunition crates where a couple of medical orderlies were passing around water. One of them noticed Joseph’s uniform with its clerical collar.

“We don’t need you yet, cobber!” he said cheerfully. His accent was broad Australian, his face sunburned and lantern-jawed.

Joseph gave him a gesture of salute. “I’m looking for General Hamilton’s headquarters,” he said. “At least I’m actually looking for his ADC, Major Mynott. It’s urgent I find him.”

“Yeah?” the soldier was unimpressed. “Pass me that splint, will yer? Everything’s urgent here, including that bleedin’ water!”

Joseph reached for the canteen and handed it to him, and the splint, then looked around slowly. As far along it as he could see, the beach was crowded. Long lines of the injured stood waiting for medical attention. Others, more seriously hurt, lay in silent pain, faces crusted with blood and sand. There seemed to be flies everywhere.

Another soldier saw Joseph’s expression and sauntered over to him. “Welcome to Gallipoli, mate,” he said with a shrug. His face was round with wide blue eyes and ginger-gold hair. His smile was cheerful, as if he were determined to find something, anything, to like about the chaos around him. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after yer.” He led Joseph up the sand past the makeshift medical unit where a nurse was creating as much order as she could.

“Never mind, darlin’!” one of the men called out to her. “We love yer!”

Someone else made an extremely bawdy comment about love. There was a loud burst of laughter.

The nurse was dark-haired and slender, perhaps twenty-five. “Back of the line!” she ordered, pointing her finger at the offender.

He groaned loudly. “Aw c’mon! Don’t be such a . . .”

“Do you want to go to the back twice?” she asked ferociously.

There was more applause.

“Sorry!” the soldier yelled.

“Good!” she called back. “End of the line!”

Grudgingly he obeyed, to still another burst of clapping and catcalls.

Joseph and his guide reached a group of soldiers sitting on the grass eating rough bread and tinned bully beef. A Dixie can of tea hung over a smoldering fire.

One of them looked up. “Wot yer got there, Blue? Reinforcements from Blighty?”

There was a guffaw of laughter again from the half dozen men.

“Only if yer feelin’ like the last rites,” Blue replied, sitting cross-legged in a spare patch without too many small stones. “Sit down, mate,” he invited Joseph.

“Bleedin’ ’ell!” one of the men said, his eyes widening as he realized Joseph was a chaplain. “Are things that bad?”

Another man crossed himself elaborately. “Here we are stuck on the edge of being wiped out, and what do the Pommies send us? One bloody preacher! You going to bury the lot of us then? Or are you the real thing?”

Joseph blushed. “The real thing?”

“Part the waters and we can walk to the other side!”

There was more laughter.

“No use,” Blue said cheerfully. “We don’t want to be on the other side, dumbo!”

“Speak for yourself, mate! I’d love to be on the other side!” He turned to Joseph. “What are you here for, Rev? Maybe you can turn the stones to bread?”

“How about turning the water to wine?” another suggested.

“Actually I’m no use at all,” Joseph said candidly. “I need you to help me.”

“Too right, you do!” three of them replied in chorus.

“What’s yer problem, sport?” another asked, squinting a little at him. “Apart from that yer here, o’ course. We all got that one.” He grinned, showing a gap tooth at the front.

“You couldn’t wait to get ’ere, yer stupid bastard!” the man next to him pointed out. “ ‘We gotter go!’ yer kept sayin’—‘We gotter go!’ ”

The first man lifted his hand dismissively. “Well, we have gotter.”

“So what d’yer want then, mate?” Blue faced Joseph, his wide eyes curious.

“I’m looking for a Major Mynott, General Hamilton’s ADC,” Joseph replied. “He has important information about a traitor.” He used the word intentionally, since he knew it would burn their emotions. They were young men who had heard the need of their mother country, dropped what they were doing and come from the other side of the world, in their thousands, to shed their blood in France and on these hell-raked beaches. Surely to them there would be no uglier word?

“So you’re not a holy Joe for real?” A flicker of disappointment crossed Blue’s eyes. “You’re a spy, or whatever they’re called.”

Joseph smiled with a little grimace. “Actually I’m very much a holy Joe. My name’s Joseph Reavley, and I’m a chaplain on the Western Front. I was home on leave and the intelligence officer who was supposed to come was called away since the Germans just sank the Lusitania. Over eleven hundred civilians were drowned, men, women, and children. I was on leave from the Ypres Salient, where my regiment is, so he asked me to come in his place. I need to be back in time to return to Flanders in ten days.”

Blue let out a low whistle, his eyes round. “Well, I’ll be . . . ! So you’re a dinkum priest! What’s Flanders like, sport? Is the gas as bad as they say?”

“Yes. Whatever they say, it’s as bad. Can you help me find Mynott?”

“ ’Course we can, eh?” He looked around the group, and everyone replied with vigorous agreement. “Mind it feels in the air like there’s going to be another raid up the hill soon,” he added. “Maybe we’d better start asking now. If Mynott’s the geezer I think he is, he’s a real scrapper. He’ll be up there with the men.”

“Best not waste time,” they agreed. “C’mon then, mate.”

They rose to their feet carefully, ever mindful of Turkish snipers on the escarpments above the beach.

It was not as warm as Joseph had expected, and the terrain was appalling: rock and clay, open hillsides, gullies with trees and—incredibly—wildflowers. Everywhere there were smells of earth, latrines, creosol, tobacco, cordite, and the sharp fragrance of wild thyme. As in Flanders there were dead bodies no one had had the chance to bury, and clouds of flies, black, blue, and green ones. Joseph did not have to be told that dysentery and similar diseases were almost as big a danger as the Turkish guns.

The Australians were unceasingly helpful, although while their ferocious lack of respect for British army regulations caused occasional setbacks, it also swept away some of the impediments of officialdom.

At sundown the huge sweep of sky was stippled with mackerel clouds shot through with light. The Aegean Sea was a limpid satin blue beneath it, though still dotted with ships and struggling men.

Joseph sat on a patch of stony ground a hundred feet or so above the beach, shivering a little with cold and exhaustion.

For four hours he had scrambled over ridges and scree, floundering, tripping rather than falling into trenches that were little more than scrape holes in the earth. Once he had had to duck and run to avoid the raking fire of Turkish machine guns, before he had reached the place where he had been told Mynott would be.

Apparently he had led a raid uphill, hoping to capture a Turkish position and take a few prisoners. It was hopelessly against the odds, and it had failed, but the attempt had improved morale greatly.

Now Major Mynott sat opposite him on the thyme-scented earth, his arm wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage, his face gaunt. He was a man of medium height with a prominent nose and slightly hooded eyes that at the moment were shadowed with the horror of so much violence, disorder, and sudden death.

“What can I do for you, Captain Reavley?” he said with barely concealed impatience. “I really know nothing of use to military intelligence. As you may have noticed, it is something we have very little of around here.”

“We don’t have any to spare in Ypres either,” Joseph replied. “But this is to do with something that happened before the war, in Germany, and I’ve been told that you are familiar with the details.”

“I was in Germany before the war,” Mynott agreed, frowning. The sky was fading at his back, the color bleached out, silver bars of light on the water interspersed with pools of shadow, the vast horizon melting into the night.

“You knew a man named Ivor Chetwin,” Joseph went on, forcing his concentration back to the present. They were on a long escarpment where the ground was too hard to dig more than a few inches. How anyone, even a madman, had thought soldiers could storm up these hills in the face of shells, mortars, and machine-gun fire was beyond imagination.

“Not very well,” Mynott answered. “Met him perhaps half a dozen times.”

“He was betrothed to Princess Adelheid von Gantzau.”

“Yes.” Mynott’s expression was guarded.

“Can you tell me something about her father?” Joseph asked. “He and Chetwin were close, I believe, and Gantzau was a friend of the kaiser.”

“Do you suspect Chetwin of something?” Mynott was blank.

“I can’t tell you. Please, the matter is of the greatest importance.”

Mynott regarded Joseph with curiosity and it was quite a long time before he answered. “I don’t know what you have been told,” he said slowly, seeming to pick his words with deliberate care. “But most of the story is true. Gantzau was a friend of the German royal family, and certainly he knew Schenckendorff and many of the others like him who had political ambitions and strong ideas.” He winced slightly as he moved and the pain in his arm shot through him. “But in Europe before the war all sorts of people knew each other. I knew many of them myself. After all, our king and the kaiser are first cousins. Don’t read anything into that.”

“And Reisenburg?” Joseph asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“Chetwin knew Reisenburg? Are you sure?”

Mynott squinted at him. “You said it as if you want the answer to be no, but you’re afraid it’s yes.”

Someone walked past them in the dark. The smell of tobacco smoke was sharp in the air, and crushed wild thyme where their boots trod on it. He passed, not much more than a shadow. There was sporadic gunfire. Were it not for the starlight over the sea, and the sharp slope of the hill, Joseph could have imagined himself back in Ypres.

“I need to know,” he said aloud.

Mynott caught the urgency in his voice. “Look, Captain, Chetwin fell in love with Adelheid. She was young, beautiful, and full of life. He was older, but he was vigorous and highly intelligent. Her family were reasonably happy about it.”

“I heard he was engaged to marry her?” Joseph asked.

“Do you want the story, Captain, or just the end?” Mynott said testily.

Joseph apologized.

Someone coughed a few yards below them on the hill, and the smell of smoke drifted up in the air. Seabirds were circling high overhead, riding the currents of warmer air in the very last light.

Mynott resumed the tale. “The affair became serious, and indiscreet. Adelheid was with child. That was the point at which the family insisted Chetwin marry her. It grew unpleasant.” Mynott shrugged, but Joseph could see only the faintest movement in the near darkness. “Chetwin refused.”

“He refused?” Joseph was horrified, not only for the dishonor of such an act, but because it made no sense of the information Matthew had given him. “What did Gantzau do?” He leaned forward. “Why did Chetwin refuse? Surely he didn’t doubt the child was his?” The situation seemed uglier with every new fact.

Mynott’s voice was tired and strained with pain.

“I don’t know. But he told me that Adelheid did not want to marry him, and he believed there had been someone else she cared for far more, but who couldn’t or wouldn’t marry her.”

“But he was engaged to marry her!” Joseph insisted. Surely Matthew could not be mistaken in so simple a fact?

“Her parents insisted,” Mynott replied. “I don’t know whether the child was his or not. The parents thought it was and they forced him into an engagement.”

“Forced?”

“He would have been politically ruined if they made it known he had taken advantage of a noblewoman, twenty years younger than he, got her pregnant, and then abandoned her.” Mynott was impatient with Joseph and contemptuous of Chetwin. “It would ruin her, and her father would make damn sure it took him down, too.”

That was easy enough to believe. “But he didn’t marry her!” Joseph pressed.

“No. She miscarried the child. It was very bad. She bled to death.” Joseph could not see Mynott’s face in the darkness, but he could hear the pity rasping in his voice, and for a blinding moment all his own loss returned to him, as if the carefully nurtured skin had been ripped off his wound. It was as if Eleanor and his own child had died only yesterday. It seemed absurd to sit here in this harsh grass of Anzac Cove, where the earth and the sea were stained with the blood of thousands of men, and still feel such overwhelming sadness for individual losses from a past that seemed to have disappeared into a life that was like a dream from which one had permanently awoken.

“What happened to Chetwin?” He forced himself back to the present.

“He left Germany, and would be a damn fool ever to go back there,” Mynott answered. “Anyone near the court would string him up by the . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

“I see.”

“Is that helpful?”

“It . . . it proves the theory is wrong,” Joseph said with surprise, and a strange, dizzy sense of relief, which was absurd. They must find the Peacemaker, for John and Alys Reavley, for Sebastian, for Reisenburg, and now for Cullingford. He had not been beaten because the treaty was taken from him before it could be presented to the king. No one knew if the king would even have signed it! The Peacemaker would have other plans, and they needed desperately to know what they were. All kinds of sabotage, betrayal, and deceit were possible, and the very fact that he would murder Cullingford showed he was still powerful, and dangerous.

But something in Joseph still shrank from finding it was a man he had liked. The face of evil should not be familiar, it should be strange, terrifying, unknown before the instant of confrontation.

The Peacemaker was a man who would sell a nation of forty million people into oblivion, betray into bondage their history, their culture, their language, and everything they had created over a thousand years. French in all its wit, color, sophistication, and pride would become a dead language. And after France and Belgium, one by one the other nations would fall, subjugated to the iron control necessary to keep them obedient, afraid, and unable to move against the center.

And England would be worse, not the betrayed but the betrayer! That was the ultimate sin.

He stared out to sea where the rising moon barely glimmered on the faint ripples of the water. It was becoming difficult to see the black outlines of the ships, or the boats plying between them. Around him he could hear the clang of iron shovels on the rock in the earth as burial parties worked.

The army had not been long here. Blood was still fresh. There were no rats like those at Ypres—at least he had not seen any. The latrines smelled much the same, but there was not the stench of corpses—so many of them weeks and months old. There you could hardly dig a trench or shore up a broken wall without slicing into a limb.

If the Peacemaker’s plan had worked, all those men would still be alive. This hill would be empty of everything but wild irises and the purple-flowering Judas trees. There would be silence but for the lap of water, and perhaps the odd bleat of a goat or two.

These men would be at home with their families in the far corners of the earth.

But which was the greater madness, and which the sanity—to fight and die by the tens of thousands for what you believe, not knowing if you could win, or to surrender before the bloodshed, and save all the lives, the young and brave and so passionately innocent, to live out their days a conquered people, prisoners to someone else’s will?

“I don’t know anything else about Chetwin,” Mynott said apologetically.

“No . . . no, I think that’s probably enough,” Joseph answered him. “We were wrong. It couldn’t be what we thought.”

“Does it matter a lot?”

“Yes. It matters a hell of a lot.” Of course Matthew would have to check that it was true, but Joseph believed it. The Peacemaker had intended to succeed. Setting up a double bluff like this, at the expense of a young German noblewoman’s life, was absurd, disgusting, and above all completely self-defeating. “Thank you. I’ll see if I can get a lift on the next ship going home again.”

“Well, there’s nothing going out tonight. You might as well get a little sleep,” Mynott observed. “Tomorrow look for a fellow called Richard Mason, war correspondent. He’s down to go either tomorrow or the next day. If you can find him, you can probably thumb a lift with him.”

“Thank you. I’ll do that.”

Joseph slept on the earth about fifty feet up. It was hard and cold and only exhaustion gave him any rest at all. Perhaps a few nights on the ship had made him soft?

He woke quite a while after dawn and looked down on the beach full of activity. Men were moving about as if on the scene of some busy factory yard, digging, carrying, piling up boxes and crates. The smell of smoke drifted up from cooking.

Joseph thanked the Australians with whom he had camped for the night.

“Hooray, mate!” Blue answered cheerfully. “Holy Joe! I like that!” He laughed till the tears filled his eyes.

“G’day, sport,” Flanagan called out. “Mind where you go!”

“You, too.” Joseph refused to think what their chances were. He would choose to believe they would be among the few who would survive. “Thank you,” he said again.

He set off along the ridge and down on the grass toward the level, in roughly the direction he had been told he might find the correspondent Richard Mason. Actually he was looking forward to it—he had seen his name on many of the best and most honest articles he had read. The man had an ability to catch the experience of a small group in all its passion and immediacy, and make it represent them all. There was something clean and unsentimental in his use of language, and yet the depth of his feeling was never in doubt.

It took him nearly two hours, by which time his feet were sore and he was horribly aware of the flies everywhere.

“Over there, mate,” a lanky Australian pointed. “That’s the Pommie writer feller.”

“Thank you,” Joseph said with profound relief. He could see only the man’s back. He wore a plain khaki-colored jacket and trousers and a wide-brimmed hat jammed on his head.

“Excuse me, are you Richard Mason?” Joseph asked when he reached him.

The man turned around slowly. He had an unusual face, with wide cheekbones and a broad, full-lipped mouth. It was a face of high intelligence, but far more striking was the brooding emotion in it, the sense of will. Joseph was certain he had found the right man; such features belonged to one who would write with blazing honesty.

“Yes,” Mason answered. “Who are you? A chaplain!” He looked surprised and very slightly amused.

“Joseph Reavley,” Joseph told him. “I had a mission out here, which I have completed. I understand you are shortly leaving for England. I need to return as soon as possible, and if there is room in your transport I would be grateful.”

Mason’s eyes flickered for a moment of puzzlement, then he looked beyond them both at the milling men on the beach and up the slope at the dugouts, the shallow trenches, the makeshift shelters of stones and boxes. Finally he looked back at Joseph. “Your mission is finished, you said?” His implication was clear.

Joseph regarded him levelly and a little coldly. “Yes, it is. I have only a few days more leave before I have to report back to my regiment at Ypres.”

Mason colored faintly. “I’m sorry.” It was said frankly. His diction was perfect, a little sibilant, but there was a beauty in its exactness as if words were precious to him.

Joseph offered his hand.

Mason grasped it. “There’s a ship going back toward Malta tomorrow. Probably about dawn. They’ll find room for you. Won’t be hard to get a troopship home from there.” His eyes searched Joseph’s face curiously. “Yours must be a rotten job a lot of the time. How the hell do you tell people they can make sense out of all this?” He gestured toward the rock escarpments almost six hundred feet above them where the Turkish guns commanded most of the bay. “Fever, dysentery, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, seasickness, overcrowding. One hospital ship out there has eight hundred and fifty wounded, and two doctors to look after them all. And one of those a bloody vet!” The anger was profound and so deep inside him it showed only in the lines of his face and the rigid tension of his shoulders, there was no surface fire anymore. It had long since worn itself out.

“I don’t try,” Joseph answered. “I deal with people one at a time. I can only address the small things.”

“In other words you can’t make sense of it either,” Mason concluded with a certainty that obviously gave him no pleasure. “You’ve given up on telling them this is some kind of divine destiny, and necessary furnace of affliction, and they should cling onto belief, and just endure?”

“Actually I don’t tell people much of what they should do at all,” Joseph answered. “Most people are doing their best anyway. The big choices are taken away from us, it’s only how we react that’s left.”

Mason turned away. The sunlight was harsh on his face, showing the lines of strain around his eyes. He looked about Joseph’s own age, but the knowledge and the rage inside him were timeless. “It would have been nice if you could have given some great cosmic answer,” he said drily. “But I wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Have you had anything to eat today?”

“No. I wanted to be sure to find you.”

Mason hesitated, as if to ask another question, then changed his mind. He turned and led the way through the wiry grass and the tumbled clay and rocks along toward a makeshift field kitchen. Half a dozen men were cooking and a group was already lining up for breakfast.

Joseph waited his turn, and was glad to walk away with a plate of stew, a couple of hard biscuits, and a mug of tea. He sat next to Mason on the ground in the shelter of a rock to eat, aware of the tensions around him, the constant glances up at the headlands where the Turkish guns were dug in and commanded almost all the advances up the slopes.

There was a lot of good-natured banter. The men were mostly Australians and New Zealanders, but there were just the same sort of robust and colorful complaints he would have heard at Ypres. Only the accents were different, and the individual terms of abuse. The subjects were the same: the food, the officers, the general impossibility of doing what was commanded. Men had sore feet, bellyache, only here they tried bathing in the sea to get rid of the ever-present lice. It didn’t work any better than the matches in Flanders.

It was early afternoon and Joseph was up the incline a dozen yards away from Mason, observing him writing notes, when the attack started. Men poured up the hill, charging the Turkish positions. Gunfire was incessant: The heavy artillery dug in behind the trenches and gullies; the machine guns’ rapid, staccato fire; and the boom of ships’ guns from the battleships in the bay.

Joseph followed Mason up to the lowest line of the dugouts and shallow trenches. The wounded came rapidly. A few were carried on stretchers, but most were floundering on their own feet, staggering and falling. Some were more seriously hit, and carried by their fellows. At times it was hard to tell which were the injured men; there was blood everywhere.

Once Joseph looked up from a rough piece of field first aid he had been performing to find Blue on his knees in front of him. His tunic front was scarlet with blood, his hair matted, his face almost gray.

Joseph felt a lurch of horror so intense for an instant he was unable to move.

“Y’all right, sport?” Blue said hoarsely. “Look like you seen a ghost! Here.” He half hauled a blood-soaked body forward. One arm was shattered, the hand gone altogether, and its left foot was blown away. “See what you can do for him, will you? He . . . he was a good bloke.” His eyes pleaded to be told something better than the truth he already knew.

“Of course,” Joseph gulped, dizzy with a surge of relief that it was not Blue, although it was senseless. Blue was going straight back up into the fire, and it could be him next time, or the time after. Only a fool would imagine any of them had much of a chance of coming out of this without some fearful wound. Perhaps those who died quickly were among the fortunate. Their families would grieve, but that was secondary to the hell that was going on here, now.

He took the dying man from Blue and told him to go back. There was no need for him to remain and watch.

Blue waved his hand and, ducking low, started back up again, rifle slung over his shoulder, feet scrabbling on the stones.

Joseph bent to the man on the ground. He was gray-faced, but still breathing. There was no way of knowing if he was conscious enough to feel the pain, or understand what had happened to him, but Joseph spoke to him as if he did.

“Hang on there,” he said calmly. “You’re in the first-aid station now. We’ll patch you up. Give you something for the pain, as soon as we get a bit further down.”

The man’s eyelids fluttered. It might have been because he heard, or just a response to the agony in his body.

Joseph took a wet rag and cleaned the man’s face gently. It was a totally pointless gesture in every practical sense, but it showed someone cared. If he was even half conscious he would at least know he was not alone.

Ten minutes later he died, and Joseph moved to the next batch of wounded brought down. He helped medical orderlies, most of whom had little training. One was a veterinary surgeon from somewhere in New Zealand. He was skilled and worked with frantic dedication and an air of confidence. It was very reassuring to those who did not see his moments of panic as he reached for medicines and equipment he did not have, and fumbled now and then in human anatomy.

“Thanks, Padre,” he said as Joseph handed him a bandage, then held the injured man’s white-knuckled hand while the wound was bound up. “Where’d you come from?” he went on conversationally. “You speak like a Pommie.” He finished his bandaging and eased the man up.

Joseph leaned forward quickly to help, taking the man’s weight. “That’s right,” he agreed. “Cambridgeshire.”

“You mean where they have the boat race?” His face lit up. “I’d like to see that.” He washed the bench down with creosol.

“Actually they have it on the Thames, near London, but we row against Oxford, every year.”

The vet grinned. “Don’t always win, though, do you!”

“Not always,” Joseph conceded. He held the next man while the vet straightened a dislocated limb, but there was no time to wait for the waves of agony to pass before moving the man and starting on the next.

“Train a lot of horses in Newmarket, don’t you?” the vet asked, jerking his head to indicate that he needed Joseph’s help lifting a dead man so he could reach the living. “Love horses. God, I hate to see them hurt!”

Later Joseph helped carry the injured down to the beach and onto tenders to take them out to the hospital ships. It was there that he met Mason again, who was also exhausted and covered with blood. He had lost his hat, and his black hair was falling over his face. There was a gentleness in his hands as he lifted the wounded and eased them into half-decent positions of comfort that momentarily masked the savage rage inside him.

It showed again later when close to exhaustion he stopped for an hour. He and Joseph sat together drinking scalding tea with rum in it, their backs against a pile of ammunition crates. Joseph was so tired every muscle in his body ached as if it had been wrenched and his bones had been bruised. Like Mason, he was caked in blood and his skin abraded by sand. It was an effort to hold the mug, but the rum in the tea was worth it.

“The bastard who thought of this bloody fiasco should be made to be here!” Mason said through clenched teeth. His eyes stared far away, as if he could see something out toward the horizon, and everything closer was a blur.

Joseph did not answer. Agreement was unnecessary. He sipped again and felt the fire slide down his throat and hit his stomach. This whole expedition was a nightmare from which he did not know how to waken. Perhaps life was the nightmare, and death was the awakening? Did the men who were slaughtered here open their eyes to some quiet place where they were whole again, with the people they loved around them, and no pain? Or was this all it was—hope and then disaster—and finally oblivion?

Mason climbed to his feet stiffly and looked at the water, then slowly he started to walk toward it, taking his boots off, then his clothes as he went.

Joseph did the same and followed after him, only half certain what he intended to do.

Mason reached the edge, and without hesitation, waded in. When he was waist deep he bent and scooped it up in his hands and then poured it over his head. He did it again and again, as if to wash away more than the blood and dirt.

He turned to look at Joseph, a couple of yards away.

“Tell me, Chaplain, how much of this can be washed off? I could scrub down to the bone, but would all the seas of the earth take it out of my mind? I wonder if Churchill has read Macbeth? What do you think? Would his hands ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ with this bloody slaughter? There’s no victory, no sense, just death and more death.”

He walked back to the shore, dragging his feet against the tide, and put on his clothes again. Joseph did the same, the fabric sticking to his wet body.

“We’ll be out of here in the morning,” Mason said, his words terse. “In three days, if I’m not torpedoed by some bloody U-boat, I’ll be back in London and I’ll write a story that’ll get this insane carnage stopped. Once the nation knows what the truth is they’ll throw this government out.”

“You can’t tell them what it’s like,” Joseph replied flatly. “Even if you could write a piece that would describe this . . .” He was too stiff to point, he just glanced around. “They wouldn’t publish it. It’s all censored. It has to be, or it would break the spirit at home. We’d get no more recruits.”

“You want more men to come out and be slaughtered like this?” Mason asked, his eyes burning with accusation, but it sprang from his own raw, hurting anger, the inner wounds bleeding, not a desire to hurt Joseph.

“I’d rather not have war at all,” Joseph replied. “But I didn’t get to choose.”

“None of us did!” Mason said bitterly, bending to tie his bootlaces. “If we were told the truth, then perhaps we would have! At least we’d have gone into it with our eyes open.”

“You can’t tell all the truth, only part of it,” Joseph pointed out. “Anything you say is going to be your judgment, what you see and feel. Do you have the right to decide what other people must know, when they can’t do anything to change it?”

“I have more than the right,” Mason replied, straightening up. “I have the duty. We are a democracy, not a dictatorship. You can’t choose if you don’t know what the choices are.” He half turned to face Joseph, wincing as a strained muscle in his shoulder shot through with pain and he moved gingerly to ease it. “Tell me that you believe any sane man or woman in England would choose this,” he said the word with a savagery that tore the sound out of him, “if they knew what it was. Is this glory? Are these Rupert Brooke’s heroes, ’swimmers into cleanness leaping’ from this life to some mythical Valhalla? God in heaven, man! If you’ve any humanity at all, look at it! It’s worse than barbarity, it’s a hell only a civilized imagination could conceive! It’s a refinement of madness beyond the merely bestial.”

“And is telling people at home going to help anything?” Joseph asked with quiet pain.

Mason’s eyes blazed.

“Of course it will! Men won’t volunteer for this if they know the truth. There’s nothing glorious in it! There’s nothing even useful! They’re dying because of incompetence! We aren’t going to take the Dardanelles, we aren’t going to take Constantinople, and we aren’t going to liberate the Russian Grand Fleet! The Eastern Fronts are going to be against the Italians, poor sods, and the Russians in the north—if anyone’s insane enough to try that. Napoleon failed. That should be a lesson to anyone.”

Joseph smiled with a downward twist. “Now who’s being naive?”

They reached the spot where they had sat before. Their mugs were still there. Mason picked up his and looked at the dregs. “You don’t think the kaiser will march against the tsar? This whole abattoir is a glorified family feud! They’re all bloody cousins!”

“I meant,” Joseph corrected him, “that I don’t think anyone is instructed by the lessons of history.”

Mason smiled at last, a curiously honest expression that suddenly shed years from his face. “Have another cup of tea? At least the rum’s real. Then we’ll go and see if we can get some of these poor devils out to the hospital ships. Not that they’ll be that much better off there! They can exchange being shot at for being seasick. Personally, I think I’d rather stay here and take my chances.” Without waiting for Joseph to answer, he took both mugs over to the field kitchen.

Joseph relaxed a little. There was still time to try to make Mason see the terrible damage of what he intended. When they were at sea, away from this horror, he would be able to convince him that it would be wrong.

They spent the rest of the daylight helping the wounded men who could walk, carrying those who couldn’t. It was backbreaking and heartrending work. Another three times Joseph struggled up the hillside himself to help more men down. He stepped in blood, tripped over bodies, sometimes only limbs or torsos, riddled with bullets or blown apart by shells. In the shallow trenches British, Australians, and Turks sometimes lay together, indistinguishable in the blood and earth. The smell of slaughter filled his mouth and throat and lungs. The wild thyme was gone; even the sharp sting of creosol couldn’t penetrate through the sick sweetness of blood.

It was after midnight when he sank into a dazed exhaustion and the oblivion of sleep overtook him until dreams invaded it, full of torture and screaming.

He awoke with a jolt to daylight and someone throwing a bucket of seawater in his face. Its saltiness was exquisitely clean. He gasped and sat up, struggling for breath.

“There y’are, cobber!” a voice said cheerfully. “An’ there’s plenty more where that came from. But if yer ain’t broke your legs, yer can fetch it for yerself.”

“Hey! It’s Holy Joe!” another more familiar voice added. “Let’s get the poor bleeder some breakfast. For a Pommie he wasn’t too bad last night.”

Joseph clambered to his feet, pushing his hair off his face and wiping the water away. His body ached appallingly. “Thanks, but I need to find the journalist. He’s shipping out today, and I’m getting a lift with him. Thanks all the same.”

“No you aren’t, sport! He left a couple of hours ago!”

Joseph froze. “What?”

“Guns got your ears? He left a couple of hours ago—at least! He’s long gone—over the horizon on his way to Malta by now. You’ll have to take the next ship—whenever that is. Have a cup o’ tea!”

CHAPTER

TWELVE

It was another twenty-four hours of frantic effort before Joseph could find a ship going as far as Malta that would take him as a passenger. He had to use all the persuasion he had to gain it, including his letters of authority from Matthew.

He paced the deck as the shores of Gallipoli faded behind him and became an indistinct blur, Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay no longer distinguishable. Even the sound of guns was finally lost in the wash of the sea. The island of Samothrace towered to the south, its corona of mist gilded by the setting sun. Today the beauty of the past, the heroes, the love and hate of Troy, which used to be a safe island of retreat, were simply a legacy of epic words, with no healing left in them. The pain of the present drowned out all memory. The urgency of catching up with Richard Mason before he could hand his work to some irresponsible publisher made chaos of any other thoughts.

If Joseph could just have time to talk to him, explain rationally the damage it would do! If he could make him understand what Ypres was really like, repeated over and over again through hundreds of trenches right across the Western Front, the courage and the loyalty of the men, the idea of putting off even one man from taking up arms to support them would be abhorrent to him.

Men did not go into battle in cold blood but in the fever of the moment. The price was terrible, but the cost of failure was higher.

He paced back and forth, unable to sit down, too tense to eat, too filled with nervous energy to sleep, until at last exhaustion overtook him lying in a narrow cot in a crewman’s quarters, while the man was on duty.

Malta was ancient, fascinating, full of colors, eclectic architecture, and a cultural mixture that reflected every tide that had swept the Mediterranean in five hundred years, and yet was unique to itself. Explorers, merchants, and Crusaders had stopped here. Now the harbor of Valetta held British warships and the liners, the yachts, the racing skiffs were silent and unseen.

Joseph barely saw any of it; he looked only for signs of where Mason could have gone. He asked the British seamen he met, the loaders and dockers, and eventually the harbormaster himself.

“That would be the English gentleman from the newspapers,” the harbormaster replied. “Very fine writer. Read his stuff myself. Admire those chaps.” He said it with profound feeling. “Never afraid to go where the danger is, if they can get the truth. He took the ship out to Gibraltar this morning. I arranged it for him myself.”

“Gibraltar!” Joseph exploded with burning frustration. “How can I get there? It’s urgent! I have dispatches for London. I have to get there in three days, at the outside!” If he did not catch him, Mason would deliver his work, with his damning descriptions of chaos and pointless death. Again so many of them were men who had volunteered, come willingly from the other side of the world, because they had felt it was the right thing to do. Their lives were squandered, uselessly and terribly.

At least that was what Mason would write. Whitehall would try to censor him, but he had seemed sure that he had a way to evade that. And once he had published it, and it was spread by pamphlet and word of mouth, could anyone prove him wrong?

He wasn’t wrong!

Joseph could not explain that to anyone because he dared not use Mason’s words, they were too easily repeated with all the irreparable damage they could do. He used Matthew’s letter of authority again, arguing, pleading, hearing the panic inside him burn through.

Finally as he stood once again on the deck of a steamer, this time bound for Gibraltar, watching the lights of Valetta fade into the soft Mediterranean night, emotional and physical exhaustion overcame him, and with it a feeling close to despair.

Now Joseph was racing across the Mediterranean trying to catch Mason, a brilliant journalist, a man of passion and his own kind of honor. Joseph had seen the searing tenderness in him as he had done what pitifully little he could for the wounded, body hunched with tension, rage almost choking him at the waste, the disorganization, the needless vulnerability of men exposed to shellfire on all sides.

And yet Mason’s passion and horror were irrelevant to the harm he would do if he published what he had seen. Perhaps people would rise up and try to change the government, by ordinary civil means? There would be a vote of no confidence in the House, forcing a general election. But that would leave Britain in turmoil, no one to make decisions, just as the Germans were lunging forward in Belgium, France, northern Italy, and the Balkans. It would pile chaos upon chaos. And who else was there to elect?

It would shatter faith, the only strength left when defeat stared the armies in the face, and it offered nothing but anger and doubt in return. All those who had already died, caught in the wires, drowned, frozen or blown to pieces, choked with gas, or those shell-shocked, maimed and mutilated by war, would have suffered for nothing, a surrender because no one else would come forward to take their places when they fell.

The thought choked him with a tearing grief for all those he had known, whose deaths he had watched, and for the countless others lost, and for those who loved them and whose lives would never be the same again. It seemed the ultimate blasphemy that their sacrifice should be thrown away. He could not bear it.

He ate, slept fitfully, and paced the deck, shoulders tight, hands clenched, as the ship made its way across the Mediterranean at what seemed to him a snail’s pace.

He imagined what German occupation would be like for the Belgians and the French. The laws would be changed, there would be a curfew imposed so no one could go out after dark. Travel would be restricted, you would have to have passes to go from one place to another, and explain your reasons. All newspapers would be censored. You would be told only what they wanted you to know. Food would be rationed, and all the best would go to the occupying forces, the good cheese, the fresh fruit, the meat.

But the physical inconveniences would be small compared with the change in people. The brave would be hunted down and punished, interned in camps, perhaps like those in Africa during the Boer War, women and children as well. The collaborators would be rewarded, the betrayers and profiteers; the vulnerable, the weak, the bribable, deceivable, the terrified would drift with sheeplike obedience.

What would Joseph tell the suffering Belgians to do, those quiet men and women he saw around Ypres and Poperinge and the sheltered villages and farms, refugees from their homes, leaving behind a broken land? Would he tell them they were beaten, and should now put up with it in peace, and that to attack the occupying forces or countries was actually murder? Turn the other cheek, or retaliation? Render unto the kaiser what is the kaiser’s? If you attack your oppressor, does it have to be the individual soldier attacking you, or do you use intelligence, and strike at the head? Use the most effective weapon you can, when and where they are not expecting it, against whom it will do the most damage?

They were moral questions to which his instinct said one thing, and his doubts said another. He had little privacy in which to pray, but it was only convention that said you had to do it on your knees, or with your hands folded. A few minutes alone on the deck, a forced quietness of his racing mind, and he began to see more clearly, if nothing else, at least the need to stand for his own beliefs. It should be his wish to defend others, and it was certainly his duty. How could you argue with Christ who was crucified that it might hurt, or even cost you your life?

Was there any faith at all, Christian or otherwise, that would excuse you on these grounds?

Actually it was only three days before he saw the jagged teeth of Gibraltar on the skyline, and then by midafternoon the ship was docked in the harbor below the almost sheer rise of the great rock itself.

He went ashore immediately. The air was close and there was hardly any breeze. It felt warm and clammy on his skin. The slurping water smelled of oil and refuse, fish, the heavy salt of the sea.

The rock towered above him, dense black, blocking out the pale sky littered with stars. The lights of Irish Town crowded close to the shore, with its narrow streets, cobble-paved, winding upward so steeply there were flights of steps every so often. A hunting cat slithered past him, with economic, feline grace, soundless as a shadow. A laden donkey clattered up the incline, panniers on its back sticking out so far they bumped occasionally against the alley walls.

Church bells tolled. It must be a call to evensong, or the Roman Catholic equivalent. A glance at a few streets, church towers, statues of the Virgin Mary, or Christ with the Sacred Heart, showed that Catholicism was the predominant faith, in spite of the ancient Moorish architecture of the buildings silhouetted farther up the hill.

Ships crowded the water and Mason could be on any one of them, or he could already have gone. Joseph was frantic even to know where to begin to look. Hysteria welled up inside him and it took all his effort of will to control it and start asking sensible questions of people. He began with the assistant to the harbormaster, who told him the ships due to leave in the next twenty-four hours, and then when he produced his identification, the names of those bound for Britain that had left over the last two days. There was only one, and that had been yesterday. There was no way of knowing if Mason had been aboard.

He spent a wretched night walking the docks asking, pleading for any kind of passage to England. Twice he was taken for a deserter, and got short shrift from men contemptuous of anything that smelled like disloyalty. They had no time for cowardice and he was lucky to escape with nothing more than verbal abuse.

A little after midnight he found a friendly Spaniard who seemed less inclined to leap to conclusions as to what an Englishman was doing in uniform seeking to go home instead of toward a battle front. They sat in an alley in the warm darkness and shared a bottle of some nameless wine, and half a loaf of coarse bread not long from the oven. To Joseph it was an act of supreme kindness, and he began his search again at dawn with new heart, and a sense of urgency rather than overwhelming panic.

He found a cargo steamer willing to take passengers, but it cost him almost all the money he had left. He found himself on the afternoon tide, once again at sea.

They made good headway north up to the Bay of Biscay, although the weather was rougher than the Mediterranean, even though it was spring.

There were other passengers: an elderly gentleman of Central European origin who spoke quite good English, although he discussed nothing but the weather. The other passenger Joseph saw was an adventurer who did not acknowledge any nationality. He stood on the deck alone and watched the horizon, speaking to no one. Perhaps he had no country anymore, no home where he belonged, and was loved.

Joseph slept in a cabin no bigger than a large cupboard. He was barely able to lie with his legs out in the hammock provided, but he could have slept on the floor, had it been necessary. It was warmer and drier than a dugout in the trenches, and definitely safer. And it had the advantage of neither rats nor lice. He was less sure about fleas! But it was a luxury to lie still without the constant patter and scrabble of rodent feet.

He had time to think. Over and over again he rehearsed in his mind what he would say to Mason when he caught up with him, and each time the power of it was beyond him to frame in words. A year ago he would have expected them to come to him. Putting the most passionate beliefs into speech was his profession, and he had thought himself good at it, at least at that part of it.

But since then he had lost sight of intellect and became a man of emotion, which was the last thing he had intended. He was a stretcher-bearer, a digger of trenches, a carrier of rations and sometimes ammunition. He was even a medical orderly at times of extreme emergency. He had been up to his armpits in mud and water, struggling to pull out a body, or soaked in blood trying to stop a hemorrhage. There was no time for thought. It was emotion that drove him, the one thing he had intended to avoid. He had started out determined to do the best he could, to give every act or word of comfort, honor, and faith that he knew, or prayer could yield him, but keep his strength by protecting his emotions.

He seemed to have failed pretty well everywhere.

The passengers ate with the crew, but they spoke very little. The food was unimaginative, but perfectly palatable. By the second night he was relaxed enough to sleep quite well.

He woke with a start to hear feet in the passage outside, then a loud banging somewhere very close. He sat up, for a moment forgetting where he was, and feeling the hammock swing, almost tipping him out. He scrambled to regain his balance as the door burst open and a crewman shouted at him.

“Out! U-boat’s stopped us!” He was almost invisible, but his voice was sharp with fear. “We’ve got to abandon ship. Don’t hang around or you’ll go down with it. They’re giving us a chance.” He withdrew and Joseph heard his feet thudding along the short passage and then a banging on the next door.

A U-boat! Of course. They must be well into the English Channel by now.

The man’s feet were returning. He slammed the door open again, this time holding the lantern high and his face yellow in the glare of it. “Come on!” he ordered. “Get out! They’ll torpedo the ship. You’ll go down with it!”

Joseph reached for his clothes and pulled them on. He was used to sleeping in them, but here he had thought he was safe. He slid into his trousers, fingers fumbling with buttons, and grabbed his jacket. He pushed his feet into his boots without bothering to do them up, and lurched out of the door and along the passage.

It was oddly silent. It was a moment before he realized that the ship was rolling as if it were dead in the water. Of course. The engines were off.

He went up the gangway steps clumsily, his boots slipping because they were not tied. The outside air struck him in the face, cold, wind fresh and tasting of salt.

It was light on deck, because of searchlights from the U-boat. He could see its sleek, gray hull low in the water, only twenty yards away. There were men on the deck, just dark forms beyond the glare, maybe seven or eight of them. The sticklike silhouettes of guns were clear enough.

The captain of the steamer was standing stiffly near the rail. His face was bleak in the yellow beam, features almost expressionless, mouth pulled a little tight. He was in his late fifties, gray-haired, thick-bodied, a little stooped in the shoulder.

“Get your crew off, Kapitan!” The voice came drifting across the choppy water, clear, precise English with only a slight accent. “You have lifeboats!” That was a statement; they were clear enough to see in the lights.

“We need time,” the captain answered. He had no power to bargain and he knew it. The U-boat could sink the steamer whenever it wanted to, and then the lifeboats afterward as well, if they wished.

“You have ten minutes,” the answer came back. “Don’t waste it!”

The captain turned around, moving awkwardly, shock slowing his movements.

Joseph bent to tie up his boots. This was not the time to lose or fall over one’s laces. He worked quickly, his mind racing. Where were they? If they were allowed to escape in the lifeboats, which shore would they make for? Was there food? Water? How many people?

He looked across the water toward the submarine. It was an ugly thing, but swift, strong, silent beneath the waves, a wolf of the sea. The lights sparkled on the crest of the waves. They curled over, sharp ridges white-tipped, full of bubbles.

He stood up slowly. His body still ached from carrying the wounded on the Gallipoli beach. He turned toward the other men on the deck, and came face-to-face with Richard Mason.

Mason smiled. His face was white, his hair wet with spray and slicked back over his head. The flesh on his high cheekbones shone in the light and his eyes were brilliantly readable. There was bitter humor in them, and a suppressed rage, a will to live, but no enmity at all. If anything, he could see the irony in their both facing a common foe in the U-boat, and possibly the sea.

The crew were lowering the two lifeboats. The captain moved toward the open gangway. There was a shot, a loud crack, sounding different out here on the water from the way it did in the trenches. It hit something metal and ricocheted.

The captain stopped abruptly.

“Very noble to go down with your ship, Kapitan! But not necessary,” a voice called out. “Back to the rail, if you please.”

The captain hesitated.

“If you don’t, I shall shoot one of your men. Your choice.”

The captain returned slowly. In the glaring light he looked like an old man, too stiffly upright to be able to bend.

The lifeboats hit the water with a series of slaps as the waves banged against them with jolting sharpness. The sea must be rougher than it looked, even from the small height of the deck. They were not yet given permission to get into them.

Joseph realized with surprise that he was cold. Neither he nor the other man had had time to bring coats. He estimated there were about a dozen of them, including Mason, and the other two passengers. The light played over their figures, as if trying to identify one from another. The quiet man who had stared at the horizon put his hand up to shelter his eyes. The mid-European was shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

The U-boat also had launched a small boat into the water and it was now coming toward them, a hard black shape against the serrated edges of the waves, alternating light and darkness in the path of the lamp. It was easy to see two men rowing and two more standing in the bow, guns at the ready.

No one spoke while they crossed the short distance to the side of the ship, and the two with guns climbed up and on board.

“Kapitan.” The first one stood to attention, but not for an instant altering the aim of his gun at the captain’s chest. “You will come with us. Please bring your ship’s papers. You will be interned in Germany, unless of course you prefer to be shot.” It was not a question. He assumed the answer.

“Let my crew go,” the captain replied. He made no mention of passengers. Perhaps that was a deliberate omission. Sailors might be treated with more respect than civilians. Had they been neutral nationals perhaps he would have said so.

“That is already agreed,” the German told him. “Come now.” He turned to the others. “You will wait here until the captain is on board our boat, then you will get into your lifeboats and move away. If you do not, the vortex of the ship’s going down may suck you under.”

The man in the overcoat made a wild, swinging movement with his right arm. Something in his hand shone in the light, like black metal. A shot rang out from the U-boat and he fell forward, quite slowly, as if he were folding up.

One of the crewmen lunged forward to help him, and a volley of shots followed. The second German clutched his shoulder and spun around, sagging to one side.

A handgun fell on the deck and slithered toward the rail. Another crewman dived for it, caught it, and fired toward the man in the boat.

Then there was a another volley of fire, bullets cracking, ricocheting around. Joseph fell to the deck instinctively, crouching on his hands and knees behind the shelter of the housing over the hatch. People were shouting, in anger, fear, and there was more shooting. The lights were harsh, now raking over the whole boat and the sea at either end.

Someone fired back from the deck. There was an explosion in the direction of the U-boat, and the light went out.

Silence.

Then the captain’s voice came very clearly. “We surrender! I’m coming over! Let my crew get into the lifeboats and they’ll leave!” Then he must have turned around to face his own deck, because his voice was louder. “Put down the gun! They’ll torpedo the ship and we’ll all be lost. Do it now!”

Silence again.

Joseph lifted his head very carefully to peer over the hatch. He saw in the dim starlight and the sickle moon the black shape of the U-boat against the slight shimmer of the water. A group of men were clustered around the dead light, two bent over as if working to get it mended, at least temporarily, but they were keeping low; two others stood separately, their guns trained toward the steamer.

The wind was cold and the ship was rocking as she lay without help of engines. By the rail the captain stood facing his own men.

Joseph could see two bodies sprawled on the deck, motionless. They might be wounded, or dead, or they might simply be too frightened to move. He could see the glare of a gun barrel on the wood almost a yard away from the outstretched arm of one of the bodies. It was perhaps twelve feet from the hatch beside which he lay. If anyone else reached it and started firing, the Germans would torpedo the ship, and they would all go down.

He started to move sideways, quickly, around the casing and onto the open deck. Before he got as far as the gun he stood up, aimed a kick with his right foot, and sent the gun over the side. It fell into the water with a plop. He held both hands up high. “The gun’s gone!” he called out, more to the U-boat than his own captain. “It’s over the side!”

Silence again, except for the wind and the slap of the waves.

“Thank you,” the captain said quietly, then he turned back to the U-boat. “I’m coming!” He climbed over the rail and started down. “Good luck!” he said gravely. “There are compasses on the boat. Go northwest.” And the next moment he was gone.

The other crewmen appeared, only shadows. One of them held his arm awkwardly as if it were injured. They were indistinguishable one from another in the darkness. The two bodies on the deck still did not move.

“Into the boats,” someone ordered, his voice steady with authority. “There’s no time to argue, just do it!”

There was sudden, swift obedience, fumbling now to see without the light. At least two of them seemed to be hurt, and there was another lying behind the engine housing forward. There were nine men alive. They divided four into one boat, five into the other. It was awkward, slippery, knuckle- and shin-bruising work climbing and then dropping into the shifting, swinging boats, unshipping the oars and pulling away from the steamer.

Joseph had one oar, someone he could not distinguish had the other. The man with the injured arm was in the stern, his good hand on the tiller, and someone apparently more seriously hurt lay on the boards at the bottom. Joseph pulled as hard as he could, trying to fit in with the rhythm of the other man, but it was difficult. The boat bucked and twisted in the choppy sea.

He started to count aloud. “Pull!” Wait. “Pull!” The other man obeyed, and suddenly the oars bit and they began to create a distance between them and the steamer. He had no time even to think where the other boat might be.

Then it happened. The cannon on the U-boat fired and the steamer erupted in a gout of fire. The noise was deafening and the shock of the blast seared across the water. An instant later there was a second shock, far greater as the boat exploded, yellow and white flames leapt up into the sky. Metal, wood, and burning debris flew high in the air, lighting up the waves, the stark outline of the steamer, broken-backed, already beginning to settle deeper. The other boat was fifty yards away off the bow. Mason was pulling at the oar beside Joseph. The U-boat beyond was temporarily hidden.

In the glare Mason smiled. “Can’t seem to lose you, can I?” he said wryly. “I suppose I should be grateful, at least you saved us all going down with the ship. You’re more use than most priests. Keep pulling!”

Joseph put his back to the oar again. The ship was still burning fiercely, but already the sea was rushing in and it would plunge within minutes, creating a vortex that would suck in everything close to it.

“If you’re waiting for me to say something nice about war correspondents, keep hoping. I’ll try . . . when I have time,” he answered.

Mason gave a bark of laughter and threw his weight against the oars again.

They rowed in silence, skirting wide around the sinking ship, which exploded twice more, sending steam hissing high in a white jet, then erupting in red flames just before it tipped and slid with a roar into the black water, and within moments was gone, nothing but a few pieces of wreckage remaining. The U-boat had vanished. The other lifeboat was just visible, about half a mile away.

The two other men in the boat had not moved appreciably, neither had they spoken. Now the one with the injured arm bent over awkwardly and spoke to the man who was half propped up against the side, his head resting against one of the ribs of the hull.

“How are you doing, Johnny?” he asked, his voice strained, gasping with his own pain.

There was no answer.

“Somebody help me!” he begged. “I think he’s out cold! We’ve got first-aid stuff in the locker, and there should be a lantern, and food and water, and a compass.”

Joseph handed the oar to Mason, who moved to the center of the seat and took over. The boat slowed a little, but it was possible for one man to manage, as long as the weather got no worse.

Joseph opened the locker, feeling in the dark, fumbling a little until he located the lantern and, shielding it from the wind with his body, got it alight. Then he could see that indeed there was a first-aid box, several bottles of water, hard rations of biscuits, dried beef, and bitter chocolate, and even a couple of packets of Woodbines. The matches he already had, from lighting the lamp.

The first thing was to see how badly the crewmen were injured. He looked first at the man lying on the boards. He had been shot twice, once in the upper thigh and once in the shoulder. Both wounds had bled badly and he was barely conscious.

“Can you do anything for him?” the other crewman asked anxiously.

“I’ll try,” Joseph replied. He had very little real medical knowledge, but this was not the time to say so. He certainly would not even think of attempting to take a bullet out by lamplight on the floor of a pitching boat, but he could roll up cloth into pads and do everything possible to stop the bleeding. It might be enough.

“Hold up the lantern,” he asked. “What’s your name?”

“Andy.” In the yellow light he looked no more than nineteen or twenty, fair-haired, a blunt freckled face, now pasty white.

Joseph worked as well as he could, but it was difficult and the clothes around the wounds were soaked in blood. Even when he pressed on them, the injured man barely groaned. He was sinking deeper and there was nothing they could do about it. When he had bound him up, Joseph tried to get him to take a little water, even just to moisten his mouth, but he was too far gone to swallow.

After that he did what he could for Andy. His upper arm had been shot through and it was bleeding badly as well, but the bone was intact. When he bound it as tightly as he dared without cutting off the circulation, it seemed to stanch the bleeding, even if it was no help for the pain.

He returned to take the other oar from Mason. The wind was stronger and they were having to work much harder to keep the boat moving, and headed against the waves so it did not turn sideways to them and risk being swamped.

There was a faint paling in the northeast of the sky, as if dawn were not far off. The other boat was nowhere to be seen.

“I suppose you’ve still got your story about Gallipoli?” Joseph asked.

“Of course,” Mason replied.

“And you’re still determined to hand it in?”

“You’ve already argued that one, Reverend.” He used the word with mild sarcasm. “You preach your gospel, I’ll preach mine. You want to protect people from the truth, for what you think is the greater good. I think they have the right to know what they’re signing up for, what the battle will cost them, and what chance they have of winning anything worth a damn.” He dug into the water and pulled, hurling his weight against the oar.

“You’re going to tell them the truth about Gallipoli, how many men are dying, and how?” Joseph pressed.

“Yes!”

“And what you think our chances are of winning and making it through to Constantinople?”

“No chance at all. Nor of getting the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea. And even if we did it would make no damn difference in the end. We’d probably give Constantinople to the Russians anyway,” Mason said.

“And that our generals out there are ill informed and for the most part incompetent?”

“For the most part, yes. You want to protect them? That’s naive, Reverend, and dangerous. Your pity for them, God knows why, is getting in the way of your intelligence. Maybe your religion requires you to be compassionate and see the good in everyone, but He gave you a brain as well, presumably in the hope you’d use it! Do you really think any man’s reputation is worth what those soldiers are paying for it?”

“I’m not trying to protect reputations!” Joseph dug just as deeply with his oar. It was taking all his strength and the exhausted muscles in his back and arms to hold the boat to the wind. Mason must feel the same. He had carried just as many wounded men. “I’m trying to keep up hope and courage at home, for very good reasons, and a rather longer view than you have! Few men set out on a battle they don’t believe they can win.”

“Few of them are stupid enough,” Mason agreed tersely.

“And are you going to tell them what will happen if they don’t fight?” Joseph had to raise his voice against the rising noise of the wind and the water in order to be heard. The light must have been broadening a little behind him to the northeast because he could see the stippling on the backs of the waves and the pale crests were creaming now and then. His feet were numb with cold.

“With no army we’ll be forced to surrender,” Mason answered him. “The slaughter will stop. It’s a war we should never have got into. England has no quarrel with Germany.”

“Whether we should have or not doesn’t matter now,” Joseph told him. “It’s past. Right or wrong, we can’t undo it. Germany has invaded Belgium, the land has been bombed and burned, the people driven out, thousands of them killed, their farms and villages destroyed. Are you going to tell them to surrender to the soldiers that have despoiled them, bury their dead, then carry on as before?”

“Of course I’m not going to tell them anything so damned stupid!” Mason said angrily. “Belgium will suffer, it already has, but isn’t that less evil than the whole of Europe plunged into chaos and death? We are on the brink of destroying the finest young men of an entire generation for what? Can you justify what’s happening?”

“I’m not trying to.” Joseph was staring at the two crewmen in the stern. Andy seemed to be asleep, although he stirred now and then, and once Joseph had seen him open his eyes. The other man was lying next to him, half cradled across his knees, Andy’s uninjured arm supporting his head, but he had not moved in over half an hour.

“Take the oar,” Joseph said abruptly. It was light enough now to see Mason’s face, the weariness and the strain in it, wet from spray. He understood what Joseph was thinking. He took the oar.

Joseph moved forward carefully. The boat was pitching and if he stood he might lose his balance, perhaps even go over the side. On his hands and knees he reached the wounded man.

Andy opened his eyes: wide and frightened, full of pain.

Joseph put the back of his hand to the other man’s neck. He could feel no pulse at all. His skin was waxy-white in the creeping daylight.

Andy’s good arm tightened around him. His face asked the question, but he did not speak.

“I think we could let him lie on the bottom,” Joseph said, having to speak loudly to be heard above the sea. “Be more comfortable for you. That weight would send your legs to sleep.”

“I don’t mind!” Andy protested.

“You might need your legs, when we reach land,” Joseph answered. “And it won’t help.”

Andy blinked, his face crumpling.

“I’m sorry.” Joseph touched him briefly. “Come on.”

Andy still hesitated, then slowly eased himself sideways and helped Joseph move the dead man’s body so it lay out of his way and where the oarsmen would not bump it. Then he inched back to where he had been before, careful to take exactly the same position, and pulled the piece of canvas over himself. “I’m sorry I can’t help,” he apologized.

Joseph broke off a piece of the chocolate and gave it to him. “There are only two oars anyway,” he replied.

He went back to his place again and he and Mason rowed in silence for a while. The white light spread across the horizon behind them, still without color. The wind was harder, and rising. It was getting more and more difficult to make any headway against it.

“Where do you come from?” Joseph asked Mason. He was anxious to know, and he needed to find some opening, some corner of emotion in Mason he could use to carry his argument. He must not give up, no matter what it cost. This was the ultimate test.

“Beverly,” Mason replied. “Near Hull, in Yorkshire. Where do you?”

“Selborne St. Giles, just outside Cambridge,” Joseph said. “Have you always been a journalist?”

“Nothing else I ever wanted to do.” Mason smiled bleakly. “Don’t tell me you always wanted to preach, I couldn’t bear it! Some time, even if it was in the cradle, you must have wanted to do something else!”

“My father wanted me to be a doctor. I tried, but I felt so useless in the face of the pain, and the fear.”

“So you chose the pain and fear of the spirit instead?” There was surprise in Mason’s face, but it was not without respect. “Was your father upset?”

“Yes. But he’s dead now.”

“So is mine. He died while I was in Africa . . . reporting on the Boer War.” He said the words with anger and a grief that clearly still hurt him. He was looking not at Joseph but at the sea rolling away behind them, now beginning to be touched with color, but a heavy gray, only undershot with blue.

“That’s where you learned to hate war,” Joseph observed. It was barely a question.

“It’s not a noble thing,” Mason said, his lips tight. “It’s vicious, stupid, and bestial! It brings out the worst in too many men who used to be decent. There is immense courage, pity, honor, and all the things that are finest in human nature in some, but at the price of losing too many. The sacrifice is immeasurable. And it’s a cost we have no right to ask of anyone—anyone at all!”

Joseph was quiet for a while. It was becoming difficult to hold the oars. The boat was bucking as the waves caught it from different angles and his strength was failing. He began to think of all the things he valued most, not what ought to matter, but what really did: his family, the people he loved who formed the frame of his life within which everything else took meaning. What was laughter or beauty or understanding if there was no one with whom to share it? What was achievement alone? So many things were made only in order to give them to someone else.

Friendship was at the root of it all, the honesty without judgment, the generosity of the spirit, the tenderness that never failed. In a way it was the end of fear, because if you were not alone, everything else was bearable.

He thought of Sam. If he and Mason didn’t make the shore, then at least he would never have to go and find Sam and tell him he knew he had killed Prentice. He was surprised how much of a relief that was.

His hand slipped on the oar, as if he had already half let it go. Mason jerked around, fear in his face for an instant, until he saw Joseph tighten his grip on it again.

What would Sam have said to try to persuade Mason not to write his article on Gallipoli? What arguments were there left? He had tried everything he could think of. None of it was enough. What if he failed? Finally he faced the thought he had been avoiding for the last two hours. There was only one way to be absolutely certain that Mason did not publish his piece, and that was to kill him. Could he wait until they were within sight of land, and he could manage the boat alone, then calmly take the oar and strike Mason with it, so hard it would kill him? He had no need to ask himself, he knew the answer. But was that humanity, even godliness? Or was it cowardice?

What if a ship were to see them before that, while he was still dithering, and pick them up? The decision would be taken out of his hands. No. That was dishonest. He would have left it too late, and missed his chance. Anyway, justification or excuses were pointless. If morale in England were destroyed, the reason Joseph Reavley failed to act would be utterly irrelevant.

“You would tell all of the men who might enlist and go,” he said aloud. “And then many of them would change their minds. Their families would be relieved—at least most of them would. How about the families of all those who are already there? Or who have died in France, or Gallipoli, or at sea? How do you suppose they would feel?”

“Probably angry enough to demand that the government answer for it,” Mason replied, struggling to keep hold of the oar. “Pull, damn it!”

“We can’t pull against this,” Joseph replied, jerking his head at the waves. “One misjudgment and we’ll be tipped over. We need to turn and go before it.”

“Where to, for God’s sake?” Mason demanded, his voice higher pitched, exhaustion and panic too close to the surface. “Out into the middle of the Atlantic?”

“Better there, and above the water, than the English Channel, and under it,” Joseph replied. “Even south of here we’ll still be in a shipping lane. We don’t have a choice.”

“Can you turn it without capsizing?” Mason demanded.

“I don’t know,” Joseph admitted. “But we can’t go on like this. We can’t hold it. We’ll have to be fast.”

“What about the wounded man? If he goes over we’ve lost him!”

“If the boat goes over we’re all lost!” Joseph shouted back. “Together! When there’s a lull. Wait for it! You lift out, I’ll pull.”

“A lull?” Mason yelled with disbelief.

The wind gusted, then dropped.

“Now!” Joseph bellowed, lifting his oar high, digging it round and feeling the boat turn, yaw wildly, pitch almost over as the wave slapped against the side, then as Joseph dug again, throwing his weight against it, come round with the wind and the current behind it.

Mason gasped, pushing his hair out of his face with one hand and grabbing at the oar to plunge it in the water again. Now the boat was running before the wind, but it still needed both of them with all their weight and strength to keep it from turning again.

Joseph’s heart was pounding so hard he felt giddy. He had come within feet of drowning them all, Andy as well as Mason and himself. Relief left him shaking. He clung to the oar as much to regain his control as to wield and pull it. But something in him had resolved.

“I can’t let you publish that piece,” he said clearly. “That is, if there really is a publisher?” He had to know.

“Of course there is,” Mason said without the slightest hesitation. “Some of the provincial newspaper owners believe as I do. They think people have a right to make their own decisions, knowing what they’re going to face.”

“Aren’t they afraid of being charged with treason?” Joseph asked. “The Defense of the Realm Act is pretty powerful. Or are they going to do it anonymously, so they won’t have to answer for it?”

Mason was angry. “Of course they’re not going to do it anonymously!” he retorted. “What the hell kind of truth is that?”

“Are you sure?” Joseph let disbelief burn through his voice.

“Yes, I am sure!” Mason shouted. “I’ve known the owner all my life! He won’t let the editors take the blame, he’ll answer for it himself.”

Joseph believed it. The certainty in Mason’s face, the passion in him and his sense of honor and purpose, mistaken as it was, lit him with an intensity no lie could carry.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph said, and meant it sincerely. He liked Mason, indeed admired him. “I can’t let you do that.”

“You can’t stop me.” Mason smiled—a warm, unaffected expression.

Joseph shipped his oar. “Yes, I can.”

The boat jerked sideways until Mason lifted his oar out of the water also and the boat tossed and slapped without help at all.

“For God’s sake!” Mason shrieked. “We’ll sink! What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I can’t kill you,” Joseph answered. “But I won’t help save you either.” He looked at Andy. “I’m truly sorry. But if this piece is printed it’ll be picked up by other underground papers, and will get round the country like fire. Well-meaning pacifists will pass it around out-side recruiting stations, and fifth columnists, pro-Germans will slip it through doorways and hand it out in meetings. In the end thousands of people will be affected by it. Fewer men will volunteer for the army, and our men in the trenches in France and in Gallipoli will be left to fight alone, until they’re beaten. I can’t let that happen, to save my life, or yours. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” Andy said quietly. “Maybe we wouldn’t have got home anyway. At least this is for a reason.”

Mason pushed Joseph violently, knocking him off the bench, and seized his oar, pulling on both of them and righting the boat to send it in front of the wind again.

Joseph settled in the stern, next to Andy. It was a relief not to be straining his aching back against the oar anymore. Drowning was supposed to be not too bad a way to die. He had heard that you lost consciousness pretty quickly. Not like being caught in the wires in no-man’s-land and left there for hours, even days. Prentice had died comparatively easily.

Pity Sam would not know. He would have appreciated the irony! Even more of a pity that he couldn’t tell Matthew where the newspaper editor was. He didn’t know the name, but it would be easy enough to find. Someone Mason had known all his life, who owned several papers, and was against the violence and waste of war.

He did not want to think of Matthew, or Judith or Hannah. It was too hard, too filled with pain. It hurt with a deep, gouging ache he could not control.

“You’re a fool!” Mason was shouting at him, struggling to keep the boat straight with the wind behind it. “Surrender could mean peace! A united Europe. Isn’t that better than this insane carnage, and the destruction of all our heritage, the poisoning of the earth itself? Europe’s becoming an abattoir! There isn’t going to be anything but ruin and madness left for the victor. Can’t you see that?”

“You want peace?” Joseph asked, as if it were a real and urgent question. They were being pitched sideways, one direction then the other as Mason fought to keep control, his face sheened with water, his muscles clenched.

“Of course I want peace!” he shouted furiously.

Joseph braced himself not to land his weight on top of Andy, who was watching him intently. “And you think that surrender will bring peace?” He allowed his own disbelief to ring through. “Maybe to us! But what about Belgium that we proposed to protect? We gave our word. And what about France?”

“We didn’t promise France,” Mason retorted.

“What the hell has that got to do with it?” Joseph demanded. “Do we only protect people if we’ve got treaties that say we must? Do we only do the right thing if we are forced to?”

“The right thing?” Mason’s voice rose in outrage. “It’s the right thing to crucify half the youth of Europe in a quarrel about who governs which strip of land, and what language we speak?”

“Yes! If the right to have our own laws and our own heritage goes along with it. If anyone conquers us and lays down the rules for us, then bit by bit anything that makes us free and unique will be taken away.”

The wind was still rising and Mason was finding it more and more difficult to hold the boat, even with the storm at his back.

“Free and unique! You’re a madman! They’re just dead! Bodies piled on bodies; tread on the earth in Flanders and you’re standing on human flesh! Tell them the truth, and let them choose what they want! It’s an unpardonable sin to lead them blind to the slaughter.” He yanked at the oar, his face contorted with the strain. “You’re supposed to believe in good and evil—to deny knowledge is to deny freedom—that is evil. Who the hell do you think you are, you supremely arrogant bastard, to decide for the youth of Europe, whether it will fight your damned war or not? Answer me, Reverend Reavley.”

Joseph’s mind raced. Mason’s argument was the Peacemaker’s, and he was so nearly right, so close to pity and humanity.

“You told me I was naive,” he shouted back. “You want peace? Don’t you think we all do? But not at any price, no matter how high. Belgium was invaded, and France. If we give up, do you think that’s going to bring peace? Do you think the Belgian and the French people will simply lay down their arms and surrender?”

The wind tore Mason’s answer from his lips.

“The government might give up, even some of the people!” Joseph went on furiously. “But do you think the army will? The men whose brothers and friends have already died in the mud and gas, on the wires and in the trenches? The men who’ve frozen, drowned, and bled for what they loved! They’ve paid too much! So have we!”

Mason stared at him. His face reflected the pain of his tearing muscles as he strained against the oars. The boat bucketed and slid in the troughs. He was losing. He began to realize Joseph was going to die for his conviction, and take Andy, too, if that was what it cost. The knowledge woke admiration in him, reluctantly, angrily, but totally honestly.

“There’ll be mutiny,” Joseph went on, conviction growing in him. He was so cold now that he was not moving and he could hardly feel his legs below the knee. Andy must be beginning to suffer from exposure. It grieved Joseph to sacrifice him. “In the army, and at home,” he went on. “What could the government do? Arrest all those who want to resist? Hand them over to the German occupying force? You know human nature, Mason! The brave men will flee to the hills, the forests, anywhere they can hide and regroup. Those who can’t—the old, the sick, women with children—will pay the price. There’ll be mass trials for treason, if they’re lucky; if not, then just executions. There’ll be collaborations, of course, and betrayals, counterbetrayals, groups of vigilantes, informers, and secret police. . . .”

“All right!” Mason yelled. “There won’t be a bloody thing if you don’t help me keep this boat ahead of the wind! We’ll all be dead!”

“No, we won’t,” Joseph told him, leaning forward to make himself heard above the roar and crash of the sea. “You and I will be, and unfortunately Andy, but no one else. The other crewman is dead anyway.”

Andy struggled to sit up. His face was ashen white in the cold morning light. The hard gray sea was racing around them, waves spume-topped, foam flying.

“Do you agree with him?” Mason demanded, staring at Andy. “Is this what you want, really? Because if it isn’t, you’d better tell him.” He jerked his hand toward Joseph. “And quickly. I can’t hold this much longer.”

“It’s what I want,” Andy answered, his eyes screwed up against the wind, but unwavering. “You’ve got to fight for what you believe, an’ die for it, if that’s the way it goes. An’ you fight for your mate, same as he’d fight for you.”

“And is Belgium your mate?” Mason asked savagely.

Andy gave him a crooked smile. “Yeah. S’pose he is. Your mate’s whoever’s beside you. The Germans’ve got no right to go through Belgium doing what they’re doing. Nor into France neither. We’d fight if it was England. It isn’t different, just ’cos it’s somebody else.” He said it simply, as if it were obvious.

Joseph felt a sting in his throat. It was the whole philosophy of the British “Tommy” he knew. Are you your brother’s keeper? Yes, you are, at the price of your life, if that’s what it takes. All his and Mason’s arguments were academic, deciding for others. It was Andy, and a million men like him, whose lives were the cost.

He looked at Mason’s face and saw the amazement in him, and the grasp after a new understanding.

“You throw that thing overboard and swear as you won’t write it again, or we’ll all go down,” Andy told him. “I reckoned I’d give up my life for my country, if I had to—well, this is having to, that’s all. Never thought it’d be to stop a traitor, but at least there’s some point in that.”

“For God’s sake, man, I just want to stop the bloody slaughter!” Mason shouted back at him. “Do you know how many men are dead already, and the war isn’t a year old yet?”

Joseph ached to be able to help him, but he could think of nothing else to say. Any hour, any minute now, Mason would be unable to hold the boat alone and it would go over, and they would all be in the sea, floundering, battered, struggling as long as they could until it overwhelmed them, and they swallowed water, it filled their lungs, bursting. Could it be as bad as being gassed? He remembered that with a sickening horror! And what about Prentice, drowned not in the clear sea but in the filth of a shell crater. Sam had done that, Sam, whom Joseph loved as much as a brother. He reached out his hand and grasped Andy’s and felt his fingers respond, stiffly, too cold for more.

“I don’t care!” Andy gasped. “I stand fast!”

Mason struggled with the oars. He was weakening. His face was tight with the strain, but it was in his mind as much as his aching body. He looked at Andy for another moment, then at Joseph. “It’s in my pocket inside my jacket,” he shouted. “Take the oars from me, and I’ll throw it overboard. You could be right, England might be full of suicidal idiots like you.”

Joseph grinned hugely, even though he did not know how much the victory was really worth. They could well drown anyway. It was a triumph of the spirit at least. He fell forward onto his knees as the boat tossed and jolted again, swinging round and slamming against the waves. He took the oars from Mason and threw his weight and all his strength into pulling the boat straight, safe from the trough. It tore at the muscles on his back and shoulders, but he was rested, stronger than Mason now, and he could hold it, at least until Mason had thrown the papers away.

“Tear them up,” he added aloud.

Mason made one more attempt. “It won’t make any bloody difference! I’m not the only one.”

“The only one what?” Joseph asked.

“Writing the truth, and who’ll get published.”

“You’re the one writing about Gallipoli,” Joseph responded. “You’re the one who’ll do the damage.”

Mason gave a bark of laughter. “Don’t you believe it! We’ve got a new young chap at Ypres. He was actually there for the first gas attack. He’s got an almost photographic memory, but he took notes of it all, the panic, the horror, the way the men died.”

Joseph froze. “Notes?”

“You’ll never find them, they’re all in a code he developed when he was at school.”

Suddenly the hard, white light and the waves were as clear as midsummer, burning from horizon to horizon. “Eldon Prentice,” he said aloud.

Now it was Mason who crouched as if turned to stone. It would have been impossible to deny it—his face betrayed him.

“He’s dead,” Joseph told him. “Dead in no-man’s-land, drowned in a shell crater full of filth. Don’t even think to argue. I carried him in myself. Or to be more accurate, I dragged him most of the way. He’s buried near Wulvergem. I don’t know what happened to his notes, but I can guess.”

Mason blinked, still without responding.

“I have a friend who was at school with him. He could read them. You’re on your own. Put your papers over the side.”

Slowly, Mason took the carefully wrapped package out of its safety pouch and let the waves take it, then, as if infinitely tired, he lay back in the stern and Andy passed him the bottle of water.

Mason moved back to the other oar and silently they pulled together. Joseph took count of time. The wind chopped and by midday the sun was high, but there was no sight of land.